CAIRO: "Normalization in the Middle East is not a good thing. I don't accept normalization; I'm against normalization because we don't want to let things stay the same.
With these brief, frank words, prominent Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel (...)
CAIRO: In an exclusive telephone interview with Daily News Egypt from his home in Germany, Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim attempted to correct one of the key assumptions of his critics in Egypt.
"I'm not representing the Israeli (...)
English novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner says she has been dealt a "rather weird hand in terms of personal circumstances, a fact that she has put to good use in her writing over the years.
Born to an ex-colonel of the British Army (...)
Palestinian writer Maliha Maslamani's new play, scheduled to be performed at Cairo's Rawabet Theater next week, is a continuation of her ongoing fascination with the question of identity, an issue she has explored in both prose and play form (...)
Some art lovers wandering the booths and galleries of this year's Biennale may be hard pressed to identify this year's theme among the many works on display.
The officially designated theme of "the other appears a little lost amid the clutter of (...)
With just a few minutes to go before the opening of Darb 17 18, Cairo's latest contribution to the national contemporary art scene, things were not yet quite in place.
While a gaggle of invited artists smoked and chatted in the street on Sunday (...)
Some people love shopping for Christmas gifts. They get a kind of festive cheer from it, a tingle of excitement at the prospect of lighting up somebody's face with that perfect present.
For others, Christmas shopping is akin to having bamboo (...)
There was a time when all anybody wanted in their Christmas stocking was a partridge, a pair tree and maybe a few maids a-milking.
These days people are somewhat more demanding. Christmas just wouldn't be the Yuletide season without a good book (...)
A while ago, I promised to show a visiting Englishman a bit of the Cairo nightlife. He'd seen the pyramids and a few plush hotels, but so far he'd neglected to explore one of the city's key attractions, the Horreya bar in Babeluq.
With its marble (...)
Sometimes it's nice to be reminded of what you're missing by living abroad, either to provoke a little homesick nostalgia, or to re-confirm your resolve to stay away.
For some of the expat patrons of Downtown's After Eight club, the recent (...)
CAIRO: From the May 15 Bridge as it crosses to Giza you can see the calm, glittering expanse of the Nile below. A few feluccas plough the waves, pushed along by the wind, and a rowing team scoots past on their daily practice. To the right are the (...)
British jazz pianist Alex Wilson is one of those infuriating people blessed with not only an abundance of natural talent, but also a fair helping of personal charm.
Both were on full display at his first performance for the Jazz Factory music (...)
This past week saw the final installment of the Caravan of the Euro-Arab Cinema, a touring procession of movies and documentaries spread over three years, showing in various cities in Europe and the Arab world.
As such, one would have liked to (...)
Czech film director Václav Marhoul says that his latest work, "Tobruk, is not a movie about a war; it is a movie about the people in a war. The distinction, he says, is all important.
"The film was originally inspired by a book called 'The Red (...)
The children playing football in a side street near the Ibn Toloun Mosque last Sunday evening were well aware that somebody important was visiting their neighborhood.
The main road was being sluiced down by street cleaners and holes filled with (...)
Marcia has been in Cairo for just over three months now, and she's looking a little tired.
Having studied Middle East politics at university in England, she decided to spend a while in Egypt to learn the language and gain first-hand experience of (...)
The last written words in Rawi Hage's debut novel are: "Any resemblance of characters in this novel to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. It is a sentence tacked onto the bottom of the acknowledgements, and seems a little out of place in (...)
A great many expat journalists in exotic places will recognize something of their own lives, not to mention their own selves, in Rowan Somerville's first novel "The End of Sleep.
The central character is an Irishman named Fin, who arrived in (...)
It seemed the perfect evening in a way, laid out as we were beneath the twinkling stars, stretched on blankets in the sand.
I had stopped with my desert tour guide Khaled in a wadi to light a fire of tumbleweed and stray roots. We cooked noodles (...)
English author Alan Smart's collection of three short stories takes its title from Egypt's second largest city. But the tales in "Alexandria Lost are not studies in romanticizing the city; rather they paint images of decay, squalor and (...)
When American historian Jason Thompson was first asked to write a compact single-volume history of Egypt for the AUC Press, his first reaction was to decline.
After all, such a work would span several thousand years, and take in some huge shifts (...)
Standing among the assembled audience as it milled around in the courtyard of the Cairo Opera House on Wednesday evening, I must admit to feeling a little skeptical.
The show we had gathered to see was billed as "a unique musical creation that (...)
The Carsten Daerr Trio can't be entirely blamed for the two women who walked out a little way into their performance at the Cairo Opera House on Sunday night.
The absconding young ladies were no doubt expecting a performance more in tune with the (...)
Picture the scene, if you will. A Spanish family is seated in the kitchen one summer s evening, the dinner finished, the dishes washed, when the radio crackles into life. A hush goes around and soon the kitchen in filled with the strains of that (...)
When I first announced to my prospective dining partner, a hulking Hungarian by the name of Igor, that we were off to eat pan-Asian fast food in Heliopolis, he furrowed his pale brow as only someone called Igor can, and announced:
"I don't do (...)