Half a mile from the Egyptian Museum where the street signs and advertisements rage over the landscape like palimpsests of graffiti, the old names on the marquees rise from the Arabic script -- the Radio, the Miami, the Rivoli, the Cinema Diana, the Lido -- streamlined twists of metal and glass conjuring the doomed and glamorous past. Framed against the sky, blinkered from all reminders of the present, it might almost be 1939 again, back in the days when sharia Talaat Harb was still the Rue Soliman Pasha, toast of the Middle East.