In those days Beirut was the Clapham Junction of the world’s air routes

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 201. 

Oh how we loved that house. In those days Beirut was the Clapham Junction of the world’s air routes—it was still about seven hours from London—and English friends and acquaintances were perpetually passing through on their way to India or the Far East. We made a point of giving a terrace dinner party on the night of every full moon, putting our foreign guests facing the mountain and watching their faces as, promptly at ten minutes past nine, an immense, luminous grapefruit appeared from behind Sannine and climbed slowly up into the eastern sky.