and the other at the Ministry of Education (1984–1985). Among some of Berque's most important works are his books Les Arabes d'hier a demain (1960) and L'Egypte: imperialisme et revolution (1967), translated into English by Jean Stewart as The Arabs: their history and future (1964) and Egypt: imperialism and revolution (1972). The latter, which is divided into five parts, deals with the history and social structure of Egypt from the 18th century up to 1952 when the monarchy was toppled. In an earlier work, Le Maghreb entre deux guerres ("The Maghreb between two world wars", 1962), Berque criticizes the colonial system. His administrative and ethnographic experience eventually took him in a direction adopted by few North-African-born Frenchmen or by colonial administrators: he came out in favour of independence. Berque was one of the few Europeans who retained links with the new Algeria after the bloody war. As the theoretician of third-worldist romanticism, he became influential to the entire Arab-Muslim world, and even of the Third World as a whole. Another work on the Maghreb, L'Interieur du Maghreb, XVe-XIXe siecle (1978), gives Berque's own interpretation of its history. Based on a reading of 15 texts which he had taught at the Collège de France, the book runs to more than 500 pages, and is an important document on the history of the Maghreb. Important as well is Languages arabes du present ("Present-day languages of the Arabs", 1974), which delves into the literary history of the Arabs, their language and culture. Berque's linguistic versatility is made apparent here in his translations of Arabic poetry from the classical period to the present, and in his analysis of the varieties of spoken and written Arabic. He was an accomplished Arabist, perfecting several Arabic dialects of both the Maghreb and the Middle East. He believed in the importance of bringing together different, but related, regions, whether in the Arabic- speaking world or in the Mediterranean, as can be seen from the titles of two of his books, De l'Euphrate a l'Atlas ("From the Euphrates to the Atlas", 1978) and Memoires des deux rives ("Recollections from Both Shores of the Mediterranean", 1989), the latter described by Ernest Gellner, as 'a splendid account of what it was to be a pied-noir slowly converted to anti-colonialism'. He once said in an interview that since childhood he had tried fervently 'to synthesise the cultures of the northern shore of