“... Powell was a teenager when the First World War ended, and a student as The Waste Land, Ulysses and Scott Moncrieff’s translation of A la recherche detonated in its aftermath. The combination of moral caesura and literary revolution marked a divide that Proust, though he would contribute to it, had never known. ‘This “age-gap” of the 1920s was a chasm ...”

“... offensive in the desert war; in the Anglican All Saints’ Cathedral, designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott; the British Embassy with its immaculate lawn sloping down to the edge of the Nile; the Turf Club, an all-male establishment lifted straight from Pall Mall.And there was the Gezira Sporting Club, a vast pleasure ground occupying the southern half of ...”