Bars, beaches and bravery – musician Yasmine Hamdan’s essential Beirut

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

I was born in Beirut in the middle of the civil war, which ran from 1975 to 1990. My mother tells me I was two weeks old when a bomb landed in our garden, below where I was sleeping – so we left. I lived my first years in Al Ain in the UAE, where my father was working as an engineer. We moved around a lot – from Athens to Kuwait – returning to Beirut at points…