Book description
The author of Bitter Lemons and the acclaimed novel Justine wrote a
number of short sketches as a light-hearted jeu d'esprit which have
been gathered together under the title Esprit de Corps. Here are
entertainment and relaxation pure and simple. Except that there's a
point where laughter can become painful . . . 'Whatever wars there may
be and whatever crises, there will still, please heaven, be the
diplomatic corps, with its protocol and formalities and a field for
humour which I have never seen better used than in these stories.'
John Betjeman, Daily Telegraph 'Uproariously funny and shrewd . . .
with the arrows of farce and of satire, he is on the target again and
again.' John Connell, Evening Standard
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 1958. 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.
