Sex, murder and mayhem: the wild lives of Cairo's 1920s starlets
Skip the pyramids, hit the nightclubs: Badia Masabni with her cabaret troupe Credit: © Collection of Lucie Ryzova After the Revolution of 1919, when Egypt gained her sovereignty, the new kingdom bristled with possibility. Egypt was now, as one American jazz musician put it, “a country where the Egyptians reign, the English rule, and everybody does as he pleases”. By 1922, when Tutankhamun’s tomb was being uncovered in the Valley of the Kings, Cairo had become, says Raphael Cormack, “one of the most exciting cities in the world for anyone to spend the night in during the 20th century...