Cairo is the publishing centre of the Arab world and the home of its greatest living novelist,
Naguib Mahfouz , winner of the 1988 Nobel
Prize for Literature. Earlier this year, John Theocharis went there to talk to
Mahfouz and to the two generations of novelists who have followed him. They discussed the freedoms and constraints, the dangers and delights and the sheer excitement of writing fiction in Egypt at the end of a remarkable century. Producer Piers Plowright