As a 22-year-old, future UN ambassador Fereydoun Hoveyda arrived in Paris in 1946 to serve in the Iranian embassy, where he became press attaché. Studying law at the Sorbonne with René Cassin, driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hoveyda worked in the group responsible for drafting the declaration’s final language. In the 1950s, he took a job with UNESCO and became a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, where he associated closely with François Truffaut and other contributors soon to become the celebrated directors of the Nouvelle Vague. In 1956, the first of more than a dozen books he would publish in Paris was released: a short history of the mystery novel with a preface by Jean Cocteau. His Paris-set novel Les Quarantaines (1962) is told from the perspective of an expatriate Egyptian intellectual fully at home in neither the French nor Arab world.
