![]() ![]() Cairo’s sprawling cityscape, for example - segregated swathes of sumptuous subdivisions and mudbrick shantytowns each stretching out into the desert - rendered such common ground rare.ĭespite the vastness of Egypt’s capital, car ownership is a relative extravagance, and the growing but incomplete mass transit system barely reaches even a fraction of the population, making taxis among the most vital forms of transport. That’s especially true in autocratic regimes, where the availability of other spaces in which random strangers can meet and speak openly has often been severely curtailed. Hop in any cab in any city of the world and you’re likely to be treated to lively political commentary. Photos by Peter Morgan (top), and MatHelium (bottom) ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() The framing conceit (Jenna dictates her story to a detective who has given her a digital recorder) is distancing. The one exception, a refreshingly normal classmate and potential boyfriend, is soon left behind. Jenna’s voice is edgily authentic, but other characters seem to consist entirely of symptoms-case studies in uncontrolled violence, rape, self-mutilation, victim-grooming and sexual and substance abuse. Isolated, with a domineering, plastic-surgeon dad and alcoholic, bookstore-owner mom, Jenna’s increasingly smitten with Mitch, who goes out of his way to advocate for her and invite her into his life. Today she copes with stress by e-mailing her beloved brother, a Marine in Iraq, and by self-mutilation, which recently earned her a stint in a hospital psychiatric ward. Years earlier, Jenna was maimed in a house fire. Bearing scars both literal and figurative, Jenna Lord, 16, falls for Mitch Anderson, the married chemistry teacher who helps her survive a rocky start at a Wisconsin science magnet school. ![]() ![]() ![]() Finding herself invited on to Graham Norton’s red sofa at the BBC, she asked her friend and Mustique mucker Rupert Everett to help her prep: She likes the selling part, the promotion. Success, she says, ‘has come as a most marvellous surprise’. ‘I took my courage from Princess Margaret, who was a great believer that one didn’t dwell’ ![]() And now, coinciding with her 90th birthday, as well as (no flies on her) the new season of The Crown, Christmas etc, she publishes this volume of ‘life lessons’ – a catch-all, really, for any other top toff reflections from this most likeable of survivors. She hasn’t stopped since.įirst came an internationally best-selling memoir, Lady in Waiting, then two pacy novels. It was his biography Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret that so enraged her that, in an effort to stick up for her friend, whom she served as a lady-in-waiting for 30 years, Lady Glenconner started writing in her mid-eighties. Craig Brown is responsible for the astonishing late flowering of Anne Glenconner. ![]() |