Eventually, "he reached far-flung horizons of lofty sentiment" (yes, there are translation-issues here ...), swept up in the excitement of the turbulent times and playing an ever-larger role in it.

As St. James’s Park has so much wonderful green space and wildlife to enjoy, we’ve located four refreshment kiosks at the most popular spots – Marlborough Gate, Horse Shoe Bend, Artillery Memorial and the playground. The kiosks’ curved wooden sides are easy to spot. A circular walk to Woking Palace, a Tudor Mansion in the meadows to the east of Old Woking, then around the Park Pale returning along ‘The Sheep Walk.’ From his own family he demands a much stricter adherence to Islam and tradition, and it is unthinkable, for example, that his wife or daughters might go out into the street without his permission or company, even if they are properly veiled.

Kensington Gardens – a magical park for all ages

Even within the house there is some segregation, as it is unthinkable that the women would eat at the same table as al-Sayyid Ahmad.

As you wander through the park, you’ll discover world-famous landmarks like the towering Albert Memorial and the iconic Italian Gardens. At the Diana Memorial Playground, little visitors can board a wooden pirate ship and set sail for adventure. Palace Walk has been widely praised, in part for providing an intimate view of a culture that has not been well understood by those outside it. Like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it is the rich and absorbing story of a family whose fortunes are changing with tumultuous times.In Palace Walk (the name refers to a major street in the old part of Cairo), Mahfouz details the process of modernization in Egypt from the ground up through the story of a single Cairene family, the Abd al-Jawads, in the course of a single year, 1919. The implications are momentous and the tale is enthralling - at least until it weakens under the weight of its own symbolism two-thirds of the way through. One of the major catastrophes in the book comes when Amina does allow herself to be convinced by her children to venture out and is hit by a car: al-Sayyid Ahmad sends her home to her mother in disgust at the dishonour she has brought upon him and his family by her actions.

Perhaps ‘grow your own’ is more your thing? At the allotment a series of raised beds highlight the wide range of fruit, vegetables and herbs one can grow whether you have a veg patch or a sunny windowsill. The allotment is a wonderful, welcoming place to exchange tips with like-minded growers. Be sure to visit on harvest open day and meet the volunteers who run it. Can I bring my dog? Here Henry secretly married Anne, and here, too, he later married Jane Seymour. Elizabeth I played games with her suitors and James I watched Shakespeare appear in The Tempest. Oliver Cromwell died here, less than 10 years after the execution of his adversary Charles I, who walked to his death from the Banqueting House, the palace’s last surviving building.The odd family dynamics are disturbing, but fairly well-presented by Mahfouz, the figures only slightly too simply drawn (it's hard to imagine that all would be so entirely uncritically subservient to the old man). Together, female seclusion and the double standard lead to the extremes of marital life realized in the Abd al-Jawad family. The husband spent days and evenings out, enjoying the cheerful company of male peers and loose women, while the wife for decades remained at home. This arrangement clearly could not survive modernization. The trilogy dramatizes the human quest for a sustaining belief—mainly through Kamal, but also throu Marvel at the scale of the royal landscape laid out by successive monarchs and their notable landscape gardeners, where the English Landscape Garden transitioned from the European renaissance movement.