THE BRITISH INVOLVEMENT in the Middle East began with triumph and disaster. After a hard-fought landing at Aboukir Bay in March 1801, General Abercromby’s troops and their Ottoman allies took Alexandria and Cairo before joining forces with Indian sepoys who had landed at Suez and compelling a French army to surrender. One exuberant officer shinned up an Alexandrian obelisk, unfurled the Union Jack and ate a beefsteak.
Six years later, British troops once more seized Alexandria to preempt another French invasion. This time the Ottomans made them unwelcome: their Albanian troops ambushed them outside Rosetta and beheaded their wounded captives in full view of the survivors. The British army scuttled out of Egypt and the Albanian commander Mehmet Ali sent a hundred severed heads to Cairo.
Jonathan Parry’s magisterial history of Britain’s arrival in Ottoman lands relates these lurches from masterstroke to misadventure with
