The Egyptian novelist's narrator travels with a friend to London after the Suez crisis, where they meet a British soldier who served in Suez but "never got to know the natives there, wot with army rules and all that".
It also criticised mine operator GDF Suez for failing to prepare for what it regarded as a foreseeable event.
A man in Suez even named his newborn son after Sisi, reported one newspaper, which printed a copy of what was said to be the baby's birth certificate as proof.
The result has been hugely frustrating, not least because this may be the last opportunity to question Blair in such a way on what remains the greatest foreign policy calamity in the postwar era – with graver consequences even than the Suez debacle.
The Egyptians and Saudis are coordinating a joint military response to deal with any eventuality in Yemen, including the disruption of shipping through the corridor that runs past Yemen to Egypt's Suez canal, the officials said.
Sanctions can be briefly effective against democracies (against Britain during Suez), yet tend to make democracy less effective through isolation (as probably in Russia and Iran).
The Gulf of Tonkin, anti-German hysteria before the first world war, Eden's support for Suez from the Times and the newsreels – these were all democratic governments priming the public with forms of propaganda.
He described it as the biggest British foreign policy mistake since Suez, and told parliament in the critical debate: "The case has not yet been made for military action.
Tony Blair, George Bush, Lawrence of Arabia, Anthony ("Suez") Eden – all passing foreigners who made far less impact on the ancient flow of alliances, ambitions and hatreds that have watered the cradle of so many civilisations for millennia.
That was the era of Suez.
Against orders, he sent his men into an Egyptian ambush in Sinai during the 1956 Suez war.
