BEST IN BEIRUT

There’s nothing orderly about Beirut. The traffic is chaotic, the music loud, the architecture piecemeal, bearing the decorative flourishes of 23 years of French rule – then the wounds of 15 years of civil war and, more recently, the growing pains of breakneck development.

This beachside city is my hometown. It’s also the capital of a country of 6 million people, nearly a quarter of whom are refugees and migrant workers. Despite the occasional difficulties of living here – against a backdrop of explosive regional geopolitics and entrenched domestic political divisions – so many of us Beirutis couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s where I started an ‘ideas factory’, Art And Then Some, working on cultural projects across the Middle East and publishing a biannual food-culture journal called The Carton.

In Beirut, your next-door neighbour might spend an inordinate amount of time prying into your personal business, yet never fails to send you a box of apples from her family’s