This book is an account of the author's varied conversations in Cairo on visits which occurred from 1981 to 2011, interspersed with reminiscences of Cairo in which he spent his youth, and where he was schooled with the great actor Omar Sharif, before moving to Edinburgh at the age of 18 to study medicine. Why is it being reviewed in International Psychogeriatrics?

There are at least five reasons why readers of International Psychogeriatrics ought to consider buying and reading this inexpensive and very entertaining book. First, Raymond Levy is a distinguished former president of the International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA), of which organization International Psychogeriatrics is the flagship journal. Second, he was Professor of Psychiatry of Old Age at London's Institute of Psychiatry (located at the famous Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, south London) from 1984 to 1996, where he had a huge influence on the development of a host of old age psychiatrists, many of whom (e.g. Robin Jacoby, Mohsen Naguib, Alistair Burns, Michael Philpot, Osvaldo Almeida, Robert Howard, Simon Lovestone, John O’Brien, and, as they say, many, many more) went on to make huge contributions to our understanding and management of late life psychiatric and cognitive disorders. Third, the first ever IPA Congress, at which IPA was founded, took place in Cairo back in 1981. Fourth, there is a lot of old age psychiatry in this book. There are interesting anecdotes of relatives and friends who became psychiatrically unwell in late life and accounts of giving opinions on local patients. Finally, one Arabic name for Cairo is Um el Dunia, which means “the mother of the world” – a city with that appellation certainly must be old enough to be worthy of the attention of those who read a geriatric psychiatry journal!

Raymond Levy is multilingual and speaks fluent Arabic, which he first learned from his parents’ chauffeur. He has used his Arabic to conduct many conversations with residents of Cairo old and young, rich and poor, eminent and obscure. Interspersed with his acute observations of modern Cairo are his reminiscences of the city prior to the 1956 Suez crisis, after which his family and virtually all of the city's polyglot community of French, Italian, Greek, British, other European, and Sephardic Jewish origin were obliged to leave and continue their lives elsewhere. Parts of the book are very sad (not least the apparent ignorance of many Cairenes of the relatively recent multicultural nature of their great city), parts are quite sybaritic (especially the author's account of his long running search for the ideal molkheya soup and his enjoyment of smoking a shisha), and many parts are extremely funny. I do not know whether the prize for making the reader laugh out loud should be given to his account of his elderly aunt's reply when asked by his mother if her lover, aged in his eighties, was Jewish (p. xv), or what his father, exiled to Paris, used to say when asked for service s’il vous plait by the fierce women who cleaned and then used to sit outside public lavatories in Paris 50 or more years ago (p. xii), but both stories alone are well worth the price of the volume.

Mamnou’ is Arabic for “forbidden,” and this imprecation, uttered with various emphases from puzzled cheerfulness to rigid authoritarianism forms a sort of leitmotiv throughout the book, as the author attempts, with various degrees of success to revisit the haunts of his youth, to explore the architectural and cultural legacy of various religions that have called Cairo home, and pursues numerous ideal culinary experiences.

I have never forgotten my own visit to Egypt in 1984 and the sheer intensity of Cairo is still vivid in my mind even today. Those who have never been should read this book and be inspired to go. Those who have visited will learn things they did not discover on their visit(s) and will be inspired to visit this fascinating, infuriating yet life affirming city once more. Mamnou’ can be obtained through Amazon (www.amazon.com), of which the publisher CreateSpace is a subsidiary.