I suppose technically any town that boasts a cathedral qualifies as a city, but few can be as small or as exquisite as the hilltop former capital of Malta, Mdina. The city houses only a few hundred inhabitants, but a whole series of beautiful baroque palaces and churches (including the Cathedral of St Paul) are gathered within its Norman walls. A notice at Mdina’s entrance boasts that its origins date back to 4000 BC, which is maybe pushing ita bit, but certainly underneath what we see today are Punic remains and other classical vestiges. The Romans called the place Melita, and the Arabs Medina, whereas the Knights of St John lauded it as the Citta Notabile. Tradition has it that the Apostle Paul lodged in the city after his shipwreck off the Maltese islands.

Mdina is spotlessly clean and only a very restricted number of vehicles (including bridal cars) are allowed in. The drivers of horse-drawn vehicles are also sternly warned at the gate that ‘Horses’ hooves and wheels are to be rubber lined.’ I travelled up this afternoon from Valletta on the No 84 bus, a splendid 1950s curved contraption that could have come out of an Ealing comedy, only painted yellow and white rather than the green livery of many of post-War Brtitain’s rural transport. A day ticket that gets one round the island is a snip at 3 euros 49 cents. Malta is so small that one can see a great deal in a day, but one of the pleasures of lecturing on cruise ships is calling in at repeat ports like this and going off in one’s spare hours from lecturing and researching to discover places or buildings one has never been to before.

I spent most of today up in the Jebel Nafusa or western mountains of Libya, one of the few regions of the country I have never visited before, or at least the eastern part of the region (having camped in Ghadames some years ago). Just an hour or so’s drive west from Tripoli, one enters a totally different land: Berber territory, where Arabic is no longer the default language and olive trees canter over the high plateau, watered by deliveries from tankers that disgorge their load into underground cisterns. The main purpose of my visit was to get to Tarmeisa, a superlative mountain-top settlement whose old town (or village, one should say) has been evacuated so that the inhabitants can now live in more spacious, modern homes right next door (as indeed is the case at Ghadames). Old Tarmeisa is only semi-derelict, however, as there have been attempts to preserve at least some of the houses, a bridal suite and even a tiny little farm, to give visitors an idea of what it was once like. The views from some of the windows and ledges are phenomenal, the vertiginous drops heart-stopping. And although the climate was perfect on this sunny autumn afternoon, one knows how burning hot and freezing cold the place is in the more extreme seasons.

By inclination, I am much more interested in modern history than in antiquity, yet each time I come to Leptis Magna, on the outskirts of Al Khoms in Libya, I am moved by the place. The setting alone, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, gives the site a certain romance. Not only is it the largest Roman settlement in North Africa, it is also the best preserved. One can walk down paved streets, or sit in the vast communal public loo, or wander through the Hadrianic baths and really imagine what it was like when Leptis Magna was a thriving commercial and administrative centre. The fact that still today there are relatively few tourists means that is easy to go off down a side street and be completely on one’s own.

Though the settlement’s origins date back at least to the time of Phoenician dominance in the southern Mediterranean, it really came into its own during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, after Roman immigrants had moved in. It became a model for integrated town planning, as well as a showcase for ornate craftsmanship. It is clear that the upper classes, at least, lived extremely well there, especially from the time of Hadrian. Leptis also produced the one and only Libyan-born Roman Emperor — Lucius Septimius Severus, or the ‘Grim African’ — who was a brilliant military leader who inspired such devotion in his troops that they proclaimed him Emperor. He marched on Rome where he was able to vanquish resistance and was duly installed there in AD145. Even more magnificent public works were then carried out in his home town, including a basilica and a modern port, though Setimius Severus was not able to spend much time there once he assumed the highest office. He died in Eboracum (York) in AD211 after his last campaign in Caledonia (Scotland).

Libya is justly famous for its ancient ruins, though few foreign visitors ever get to see Tolmeita or Ptolemais, which is about an hour-and-a-half’s drive eastwards along the coast from Benghazi. Founded in the 4th century BC by the Greeks, the city was subsequently maintained and enlarged by the Romans. It’s an interesting reflection of those two civilizations’ contrasting priorities that the Romans turned the orchestra pit of the lovely little Greek amphitheatre into a swimming pool.

In its full Hellenic glory, Ptolemais covered an area approximately three kilometers square, though only a fraction of that has been unearthed. Eerily, one can still rub one’s foot on the top soil in places and watch mosaics emerge. The Italians did some of the early archaeological work, though these days a Polish team is in charge, but it looks as if it will be decades before the task is finished. In keeping with Libyan government policy, there has been no attempt to create (or, presumably, permit the growth of) significant tourist facilities in the area.

In the meantime, a small Arab community continues to live in and around the site and along the nearby shoreline, some of them occupying houses whose original builders obviously raided the ruins for good stones, with the result that their facades are a curious blend of rough brickwork and magnificent marble. The little shops that lined to main street of the modern village until the 1970s have, however, fallen into ruin themselfes. There is a small museum at the classical site, which contains some rather fine statuary, as well as several really beautiful mosaics rescued from the main palace and a couple of villas while they were being excavated. This afternoon, in the shade of some palm trees at the back of the museum, a young man was grooming his pure white horse in a scene that could have come straight out of A Thousand and One Nights.

I’ve never been a great fan of the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, who has none of the breadth of intellectual and human experience and understanding of his predecessor Vaclav Havel. But all true Europeans should feel nonetheless grateful to Mr Klaus for recognising that it would be quite wrong for him as an individual to try to stop the ‘train’ of the Lisbon Treaty when even his own country’s government wants to see it brought into force. Thus by signing the Treaty he has ensured that the last remaining hurdle was removed. not only for the ratification of the Treaty by all 27 member states but also for the European Union to move forward with the reforms that are contained within the Treaty, which will make the Union more democratic and more accountable, as well as more efficient.

The other great aspect of President Klaus’s decision is that David Cameron has now been given an exit strategy from the corner into which he and his Shadow Foreign Affairs spokesman William Hague had painted the Tory party, rather like schoolboys in the playground taunting the rest of the class that they would reject and overturn what everybody else wanted by holding a referendum on Lisbon and campaigning against it. If we take Mr Cameron’s recent statement on the matter at face value, then that will not happen after all. Bravo. Eurosceptics will fume and some Tory voters may switch to UKIP, but so be it. Having a more reasonable policy towards the EU makes the Conservative Party more sensible, indeed more electable, and it gives pro-Europeans in the Liberal Democrats a good opportunity to put further pressure on the Tories to make sure that if they do become the next government in the UK, or the biggest single party in parliament, then they must engage constructivey with our European partners and ensure that Britain is at the heart of the onging European project, not sniping from the sidelines.

The celebrated Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)was born and died in Alexandria, though in between he spent time in Constantinople (Istanbul) and Liverpool (sic). He was part of that extraordinary ethnic Greek bourgeoisie which ran so much of the commerce in Egypt’s main port city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though he personally earned his living as a journalist. This morning I visited his apartment, which is now a museum: a roomy, high-ceilinged, second-floor dwelling in the city centre . There is not much furniture left in situ, apart from in the bedroom, but it is still an atmospheric place and there are plenty of period photographs and copies of books by and about Cavafy in various languages, as well as a small exhibition about his fellow Alexandrian Greek scribe, Stratis Tsirkas. Cavafy enjoyed the bohemian nature of the neighbourhood (also celebrated in Lawrence Durell’s Alexandria Quartet), writing: ‘Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the Church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.’

Some of Cavafy’s poetry was homoerotic, though in keeping with the conventions of the time, he kept his own personal life discreet. However, he did enjoy a good gossip with another one-time Alexandrian resident, the British novelist E M Forster, who met the love of his life (a young tram conductor) in this city. It’s hard to imagine quite what this place was like in the inter-war years, despite all the books and the photos, because so many of the residents of the time — Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Jews — had to leave and most of the places they frequented closed. From 1956 onwards, the city became resolutely Egyptian, and it is now best savoured by the locals as a summer holiday resort thanks to its beaches and sea breezes.

A fourth Egyptian has died from swine flu (H1N1 virus): a tragedy for the person’s family, of course, to whom one can only extend sympathy. But it hardly adds up to an epidemic. Death tolls are far higher in parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas. So why the sense of panic and all the media hype in Cairo? School trips have been cancelled, some schools are only open three days a week, university students are missing classes (well, it provides a good excuse for them, I suppose) and in the Metro at rush hour you can see men pushing handkerchiefs to their faces to keep out the germs. The minority of Egyptian women who wear the niqab (full veil) must feel very smug. Alas, there is a tragico-comic side to the swine flu scare in Egypt, too. When the disease was first publicised, some Muslim activists went on a rampage and killed any pigs they could find, pigs being the preserve of Coptics Christians. The Copts say this is all part and parcel of the discrimination that they face on a daily basis. Whatever the truth of that, it certainly gave some Muslims the chance to rid their neighbourhoods of ‘unclean’ animals.

The core theme of the 56th Liberal International Congress in Cairo is education and its relationship to democracy, which has enabled participants from around the world to cover a wide range of issues from communications technology to religion. This is the first time that the Congress has  been held in Egypt, which is a tribute to our hosts, the Democratic Front Party (DFP), which was only formally launched two years ago. When I first discussed the possibility of a new, genuinely liberal, modern party in Egypt with Dr Osama Al Ghazali Harb a few years ago, it was far from certain that it would be allowed to exist (new parties need permission from a commission which is effectively run by the ruling party of President Hosni Mubarak, the National Democratic Party or NDP). Moreover, at the time another small liberal party, El Ghad, had been seriously undermined by the fact that its leader and former presidential candidate, Ayman Nour, was in prison. Perhaps partly because of pressure from Washington, however, the Egyptian government has allowed a certain amount of democratic openness, though within definite strict limits. And the harrassment of some opposition groups continues.

Anyway, the DFP was set up and has managed to attract some high profile members and supporters. Despite an attempt by somebody with a hidden agenda wrongfully to smear the Democratic Front as anti-semitic on the eve of the Congress, the party was welcomed into full membership of Liberal International yesterday. El Ghad (already a member) is also represented here. Ayman Nour, who was released from prison earlier this year, put in an appearance yesterday, though he could not say anything, as he is forbidden by the terms of his release from participating in the political process. Of course, many of the concepts of political liberalism (especially social liberalism) are unknown to the mass of the Egyptian population. But as the country develops and the political landscape changes in the post-Mubarak era (not even he is immortal), it will be fascionating to monitor what evolves.

Link (in Arabic): www.democraticfront.org

I spent most of yesterday in the Library in Alexandria in the company of other members of the Liberal International Executive, as a prelude to the LI Congress now going on in Cairo. The Director, Dr Ismail Seralgeldin — who was Vice-President of the World Bank before taking up the post — gave an impressive presentation on how he sees the Bibliotheca Alexandrina both as a repository for knowledge and as a tool in helping build civil society from the bottom up. The Library stands almost exactly on the site of its famous predecessor of Classical times which, it is now believed, was burnt down by Christian zealots. The Library was reborn after what Dr Seralgeldin described wrily as a ’short hiatus of 1,600 years’ and has already taken on a global signifiance, as well as serving the needs of local people, many hundreds of whom were milling round the library buildings, which house various museums (including one dedicated to the assassinated President Anwar Sadat), a planetarium and other facilities.

The building, which presents an enormous slanting wall of glass towards the sea, has won many architectural awards, though personally I find its external aspect hideous. Inside, however, is a different matter, with a huge but atmospheric reading room, a ’super-computer’ and all sorts of things to gawp at. As an environment, it provided the perfect backdrop to a Congress which is looking particularly at the issue of Education in the 21st century, though as ever a significant part of the early Congress proceedings has involved the admission of various parties from around the world as either full or observer members, including our hosts, the Democratic Front Party (wrongly criticised in a Wall Street Journal article earlier this week), which only two years after its creation has managed to organise this landmark event.

Only days before the Liberal International is due to hold its Congress in Cairo, the prominent Egyptian Liberal Ayman Nour, leader of the El Ghad party, has reportedly been set upon by a dozen plainclothes thugs as he left a restaurant in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada with colleagues. According to a local news agency report, an official from the US State Department happened to be with Mr Nour’s party and managed to photograph the assault, despite attempts by the thugs to grab his camera. Members of the party phoned the police to come and help, but none showed up — which only deepens suspicions that someone high up wanted to intimidate the party. Ayman Nour is a human rights lawyer and a disqualified MP, who was only released from prison in February, on grounds of ill-health, after serving nearly five years on charges viewed by outside observers as spurious. In contrast, his release was seen as a gesture of goodwill to the United States and the European Union, which have been putting strong pressure on the Egyptian government to do more than just give lip service to democratisation. Obviously it is too soon to know exactly who was behind the Hurghada assault, but this bodes ill for the Liberal International Congress, at which Ayman Nour is scheduled to be one of the leading Egyptian participants.