Much has been written on art, literature and history and in all fairness, these essays would have little value of their own in today's world but what makes them an important read is the time in which they were written by Naguib Mahfouz. We are talking about Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s. This collection of essays by Mahfouz came out in 2003 in Arabic and this was the time when Mahfouz was still alive. The present volume in English has been translated by Aran Byrne. In the 1930s there was a rise of a new breed of Egyptian population which was less thoroughly westernized as compared to the previous generation and who identified themselves with their...