Book description
'He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and
landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation . . . Eschewing
politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles . . .
In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.'
Kingsley Martin, New Statesman 'Durrell possesses exceptional
qualifications. He speaks Greek fluently; he has a wide knowledge of
modern Greek history, politics and literature; he has lived in
continental Greece and has spent many years in other Greek islands . .
. His account of this calamity is revelatory, moving and restrained.
It is written in the sensitive and muscular prose of which he is so
consummate a master.' Harold Nicolson, Observer
Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the
Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. His
first literary work, The Black Book, appeared in Paris in 1938. His
first collection of poems, A Private Country, was published in 1943,
followed by the three Island books: Prospero's Cell, Reflections on a
Marine Venus, about Rhodes, and Bitter Lemons, his account of life in
Cyprus. Durrell's wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece, The
Alexandria Quartet, which he completed in southern France where he
settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and The Avignon
Quintet he wrote the two-decker Tunc and Nunquam. His oeuvre includes
plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous
stories about the diplomatic corps. Caesar's Vast Ghost, his
reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late
flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death in Sommières
in 1990.
