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By Ted Gorton
Published: 9:48AM GMT 02 Dec 2009

A long view of Lebanon Photo: Getty Images

Lebanon attracts all kinds of expats. Take Sinuhe, an Egyptian. He got in political trouble at home and had to flee, heading first for Byblos on the coast and then settling near Baalbek. There he married a notable’s daughter, got rich, and eventually retired back to Egypt to write his memoirs. Not your typical Lebanese expat story—but then again, that was in 1875. 1875 BC, that is.

Sinuhe was not alone. In antiquity, the famous cedar forests provided cover for the really desperate, mystical or just crazy. With time, whole tribes and sects left the plains or desert and staked out a corner of the mountain, where their descendants cling to (and defend tooth and nail) whatever cultural quirk tempted them into exile all those years ago.

Later came the eccentric Europeans, like Lady Hester Stanhope. A niece of Pitt the Younger and a famous horsewoman, Hester fell for Oriental travel after being received like a queen in Syria. She settled in an old Lebanese convent and soon became a fixture on the Grand Tour, which funnelled the great and good of Europe towards the Holy Land. Her money eventually ran out and she died alone, crazed and abandoned by friends and servants alike (an object lesson for potential expats everywhere).

In modern times, deposed politicians or bourgeois exiles settled in various Beirut neighbourhoods and gave them a distinctive flavour of their homeland—Syria or Egypt, Armenia or Palestine. There is a large Anglo-Saxon community centred in West Beirut, many teaching at venerable institutions like the American University of Beirut (AUB) or the new universities and language schools, having fled less mortal dangers like failure to win tenure. There are journalists on r&r from war zones, swapping tales at the bar of the Commodore Hotel. There are bankers and stockbrokers taking advantage of one of the few economies to have weathered the recent crisis with its banks intact. There is a frantic, diamond-and-champagne diplomatic social scene that flourishes in inverse proportion to the size of the country (10,000 square kilometres).

There are two more recent expat species in Beirut, the jet-setting hedonist and the tax exile. With the 1975-90 civil war now consigned to history, and the withdrawal in 2005 of the Syrian army, the fact that Lebanon levies only a symbolic income tax on investments began to attract serious numbers of wealthy Europeans and Gulf Arabs. Accommodation is expensive but spacious, domestic help readily available and cheap; a retired banker or deal-maker in search of a tax haven can live a chauffeur-driven lifestyle for a fraction of the cost back home.

Lately CNN and other TV channels as well as the print media have been gushing about Lebanon’s new status as party Mecca, where beef flown in from Scotland is washed down with buckets of Roederer Cristal champagne. Bevies of Slavic go-go dancers provide ambiance, and gambling is tolerated (or required, at the famous Casino north of Beirut).

Sounds like a rowdy, vulgar cabaret of a country? Well, there is that aspect, and it is easy to find if that is what you really want.

My Lebanon is very different. Since I first came here - to study at AUB way back in 1967 - I have found it to be many things, none of them remotely cabaret-tinged or tax-driven. Example: a leisurely meal in a restaurant founded in the 1960s by a Lebanese-Mexican returned expat. There you sit as midday morphs gently into evening, sipping fine Lebanese wine or heady anis-flavoured arak, nibbling from a seemingly endless parade of small mezze platters: the usual hummus and mutabbal, but literally dozens of others, from tiny white aubergines (in season, like everything else) stuffed with garlic, to salads of rocket mixed with fragrant wild thyme. Capped off by a grilled seabass caught the night before by one of the old fishing-boats that bob lazily in the sun during the day down below, in the old Phoenician harbour. For this is Byblos, where the sun sets into the sea beyond a field of untidy Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Roman and Arab ruins, brooded over by an upstart Crusader castle.

Other than the cuisine, one could add: skiing among cedars and pine with a view of the Med; staying in a renovated Druze palace-hotel in the fabled Shouf mountains; visiting the best surviving Roman temple anywhere at Baalbek; bargaining for textiles or brass in the souks of Tripoli; hiking on the newly way-marked Lebanese Mountain Trail running down the backbone of the country from north to south; or a vineyard tour, tasting a surprising variety of wines (remember the Song of Songs?).

The locals are incredibly gregarious and hospitable in three or four languages, and make the most undistinguished foreigner feel special. There is a modern international airport with a vast hub of connections.

But there is a problem. If you live here, where do you go on holiday?

* Buy Lebanon Through Writers' Eyes here

* If you have an expat-related book out, email us at weeklyt@telegraph.co.uk

Brilliant article on the Telegraph about Lebanon "Lately CNN and other TV channels as well as the print media have been gushing about Lebanon’s new status as party Mecca, where beef flown in from Scotland is washed down with buckets of Roederer Cristal champagne."

In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

By Richard Wiseman who is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and author of the The Luck Factor (Century) book

Over in the Daily Mail today I have a go at Oasis, the popular beat combo which has just split up. (Or so Noel Gallagher says, and since he’s the only one in the band who can write songs, that’ll be it till he changes his mind for the lucrative reunion tour).

To be honest, I probably don’t loathe Oasis quite as much as I make out in that article. When you’re writing polemic there isn’t much room for nuance like - “Well if someone put on Champagne Supernova right now I’d probably feel a pleasant nostalgic twinge for my lost youth” - which is more or less what I really think about Oasis: I’d never ever put on one of their records myself, but if someone else did I wouldn’t necessarily feel an intense urge to kill him.

But I very much stand by my main point which is that Oasis were derivative and overrated. Their second album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory remains the third bestselling album (after The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and Queen’s Greatest Hits) in British pop history. Does anyone out there seriously still thinks it deserves a place even in the top 50? Personally, I wouldn’t even put it in my top 100.

It’s not that I don’t like Liam’s son-of-Lennon vocals (and I also like, incidentally, that way he had of placing his mic way too high so that he had to keep craning his neck upwards like a Gerenuk feeding on an acacia tree); and I do agree that a lot of Noel Gallagher’s compositions are very catchy. But there’s a reason for the last bit and it’s very simple: they all sound quite a bit like songs you already know, most of them written by the Beatles.

You might argue that originality is a much overrated virtue in pop, given that from Led Zeppelin borrowing from the blues and every heavy rock band ever borrowing from Led Zeppelin pop has always fed on itself. But to me a truly great band is one that disguises or alters the sound of its influences to the point where you no longer go: “Ohmygod, that is SUCH a rip off.” My true greats would definitely include Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, The Smiths, New Order, Kraftwerk and the Pet Shop Boys. They wouldn’t include Oasis.

So how did Oasis ever get to be quite so massive. Well hype, quotability and attitude clearly had a lot to do with it. But by far the most interesting theory on this is in a new book on the history of recorded sound (which I highly recommend: trainspotterish but lively and compulsively readable) by US journalist Greg Milner, called Perfecting Sound Forever.

Oasis’s career, he argues, coincided with the Nineties trend in studio recording techniques for “loudness” at all costs. By “loudness”, he means music which has been heavily “compressed” in the studio - removing most of the loud/soft dynamic range and instead making it sound like the kind of muddy wall of noise which comes across well in a crowded pub. It’s actually a form of musical brainwashing: stuff recorded like this is designed to lodge in the brain and achieve massive and overwhelming cultural domination. Which Oasis did most effectively.

But the effect this had on pop music generally was disastrous. As one muso purist - a Vermont studio engineer called Chris Johnson - has tried to demonstrate scientifically by comparing the most “culturally significant” albums of all time, the music we really like (as opposed to the stuff that is bombarded at us relentlessly till we succumb) is the stuff which has the greatest dynamic range . The top ones on Johnson’s list - led by the Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 and Led Zeppelin IV - are the ones with the biggest contrast between really loud and really soft. Oasis took us down a wrong alley. On the back of their success, every major label wanted to imitate that big, sludgy sound, in much the same way publishing companies try to replicate Dan Brown novels. Good commerce, maybe; but dreadful art.

Another great cartoon strip worth reading...