The Hawk of Egypt

An Englishwoman inherits property in Egypt and finds herself pursued by a Bedouin sheikh with a claim on more than the land. Joan Conquest nursed in the Great War and then wrote desert romances that sold enormously and were denounced from pulpits — a genre that flattered the empire while it sold the fantasy of surrender to it. Fifty-nine plates of classical ruins, Roman feasts and Caesar's fate, from Apollonio di Giovanni to Hubert Robert, give the ancient world behind the desert romance its own pictorial life.