Max Rodenbeck's Cairo: The City Victorious is an entertaining and well-researched meander through 5000 years of history of the Mother of the World.A Thousand Miles up the Nile is a famous work by Englishwoman Amelia Edwards, who travelled the famous river in 1873. This book is long-winded but interesting and presents an unusual perspective on this classic river journey.EM Forster's Alexandria: A History & a Guide was written during WWI, but it is still regarded as the best historical guide to the city. Forster re-creates 2000 years of Alexandria's history and then takes the traveller through the city's attractions.Useful literary anthologies include The Nile: A Traveller's Anthology by Deborah Manley (ed) and Egypt: A Traveller's Anthology by Christopher Pick (ed). They include snippets from Egypt's more famous visitors such as Lawrence Durrell, EM Forster, Mark Twain and Agatha Christie.There's a plethora of books about ancient Egyptian history, but among the best are The Penguin Guide to Ancient Egypt by William J Marnane; The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt edited by Stephen Quirks and Jeffery Spencer; and The Ancient Egyptians: Religious Beliefs & Practices by Rosalie David.For an account of Egypt's modern history look for In Search of Identity, the autobiography of Anwar Sadat. Sadat explains the events leading up to the 1952 revolution and the birth of the modern nation.Nasser - The Final Years, by Abdel Magid Farid, looks at the period between the 1967 war with Israel and Nasser's death in 1970.Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot is one of Egypt's most notable historians, and his A Short History of Modern Egypt is a fine book that examines Egypt's development since AD 639.