the entertaining memoirs of the Middle East traveller Lady Hester Stanhope (1776 1839). Having looked after her uncle, William Pitt, during most of her youth and run his household while he was Prime Minister for the second time, Stanhope left for the Levant in 1810. She took with her a companion, Miss Williams, and her physician, Charles Meryon. 'After a couple of months in Malta, a year in and about Constantinople, and a shipwreck off Rhodes, Hester and Michael [Bruce, with whom she had begun an affair in Malta] reached Cairo, where Mehmet Ali Pasha received them with honours and pageantry. A tour in the Holy Land and Lebanon followed'. She entered Damascus on horseback in male Turkish clothes, making a great sensation, then became the first European woman to visit Palmyra, in the company of the Bedouins.