TAHIA Nasser appears to have been a typical Egyptian housewife. She worried about her kids’ health, thought her husband worked far too hard, delighted in her daughters’ marriages. Her dictator husband, Gamal Abdel Nasser, appears in her memoirs (now published for the first time in English) as a loving, faithful, reliable, doting spouse and father.

Not a hint that he hanged his enemies when they tried to kill him — no Muslim Brother would forget that — and the word “torture” does not appear on these pages.

Reading them, I kept remembering my old Egyptian colleague at Associated Press, the late Ali Mahmoud, who was hung upside down by Nasser’s goons and dipped head-first into a vat of warm faeces to make him talk. And I asked the usual question: could this be the same Nasser?

Tahia’s book — she died in 1992 after both Sadat and Mubarak had prevented its publication — is not exactly a rip-roaring read. But there are a few moments that bring you up short. Returning home on leave from the 1948 Arab-Israel war after sending his wife a series of letters assuring her of his good health, Nasser revealed that he had been wounded.

“I saw a fresh wound and stitching on the left side of his chest and asked him about it,” Tahia wrote. “He told me it was nothing, just a small wound. When I was unpacking his bag, I found a handkerchief, vest and shirt heavily soiled with blood.” Nasser had been hit by an Israeli bullet which ricocheted off his vehicle’s windscreen. Before the 1952 revolution which overthrew King Farouk, Tahia found herself hiding rifles and ammunition in the family home — and for many weeks, it seems, thought nothing was amiss. Only when she was congratulated on her husband’s successful coup did she understand his role in history.

She blithely accepts the line that General Mohamed Neguib — a friend of Nasser and the first post-revolutionary president of Egypt — tried to stage his own coup against her husband. But Neguib’s own memoirs and subsequent research suggests that Colonel Nasser falsely accused his former senior officer in order to get rid of a rival.

Loyal to the end, Mrs Nasser was no tell-all widow.

By arrangement with the The Independent