Rania M. Mahmoud, Female Voices and Egyptian Independence: Marginalized Women in Egyptian and British Fiction. London: I. B. Tauris (hb £85 – 978 0 7556 5104 7). 2024, 192 pp.

outlets, it mostly outsourced the control of public discourse to different players, institutions, heavyweight editors and journalists who understood the red lines and the regime's goals.The state's direct interventions were not regular and explicit, except for certain subjects, such as the president and his family.However, the plethora of private media outlets was not 'nationalized' per se under Sisi.Instead, the General Intelligence Service (GIS) launched a 'private' company, which extended its monopoly over media and entertainment.Media and entertainment organizations are nominally 'private', yet they are micromanaged by a clique of GIS officers who explicitly instruct the editors via WhatsApp on what to cover, what to write, and how to frame their stories.The result is dozens of newspapers, websites, radio channels and TV stations with identical headlines and reports.This is coupled with a severe erosion of the freedom of expression, continuous crackdowns, and arrests of journalists and social media users.A short review does not do the book justice since it includes troves of information.Still, there is one thing I may disagree with Hamoud about: his tendency to not distinguish between the components of the repressive apparatus.He lumps together, for example, the GIS and the army under one category: the military.Although both institutions share personnel and are tasked with overlapping mandates, it is still important to distinguish the two, since, historically, they cultivated rivalry, part of the post-1952 regimes' coup-proofing strategy, even though they increasingly worked in unison after Sisi consolidated his regime to ensure that the threat of popular unrest was eradicated.And it is the GIS that has been playing the central role in reorganizing and managing the media and entertainment sectors at present, not the military.