Saturday 30 September 2017

Lawrence Durrell at Canterbury























Lawrence Durrell was at school at St Edmund's in Canterbury from 1926 to 1927. The school has dedicated a study-bedroom wing, formerly a dormitory wing, to him. Previously he had been at St Olave's Grammar School in London.


The Lawrence Durrell Wing at St Edmund's.


Lawrence Durrell, once of Watson House,
commemorated at St Edmund's.


View over Canterbury and its cathedral from
Lawrence Durrell's dormitory window.













































Saturday 23 September 2017

Today all the Egyptian newspapers are talking about the Villa Ambron and Lawrence Durrell


Zahraa Adel Awad tells me: 'Today all the Egyptian newspapers are talking about the Villa Ambron and Lawrence Durrell'.

Zahraa and her friends and fellow activists (see previous post) have long campaigned to save the Villa Ambron, the place where Lawrence Durrell began writing The Alexandria Quartet, with the aim of turning it into a museum or cultural centre dedicated to Alexandria's recent cosmopolitan period.  But today their photographs appear throughout the Egyptian press to record its destruction.

Corruption and ugliness have ruined a once beautiful world class city.

Here are some thumb shots with links.



مسلسل اغتيال الفيلات التراثية بالإسكندرية مازال مستمر بهدم فيلا أمبرون




Friday 22 September 2017

The Sad End to Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria

Zahraa Adel Awad has sent me more photographs of the destruction of the Villa Ambron (see previous post) where Lawrence Durrell lived in a very different Alexandria during the war. These photographs were taken by her friends Dr Mohamed Adel Dossouki and architect Sherif Farag. All are campaigners for the preservation of Alexandria's heritage and all are very sad. 




This little room, how well I know it!
Now they’ve rented this and the next door one
As business premises, the whole house
Has been swallowed up by merchants’ offices,
By limited companies and shipping agents …
O how familiar it is, this little room!
Once here, by the door, stood a sofa,
And before it a little Turkish carpet,
Exactly here. Then the shelf with the two
Yellow vases, and on the right of them:
No. Wait. Opposite them (how time passes)
The shabby wardrobe and the little mirror.
And here in the middle the table
Where he always used to sit and write,
And round it the three cane chairs.
How many years … And by the window over there
The bed we made love on so very often.
Somewhere all these old sticks of furniture
Must still be knocking about …
And beside the window, yes, that bed.
The afternoon sun climbed half way up it.
We parted at four o’clock one afternoon,
Just for a week, on just such an afternoon.
I would have never 
Believed those seven days could last forever.

- Constantine Cavafy's The Afternoon Sun, translated by Lawrence Durrell












'Were it not to see you again I doubt if I could return again to Alexandria. I feel it fade inside me, in my thoughts, like some valedictory mirage — like the sad history of some great queen whose fortunes have foundered among the ruins of armies and the sands of time!'

- Clea, the final volume of The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell


Zahraa says: 'I am so sad for the villa especially I used to take my tourists group around for Lawrence Durrell tour in Alexandria; now it is totally gone.  The developer is Mr Abdel Aziz who will build a new apartment building called Al Amraa Palace (Royal Princes Palace)'.

Thursday 21 September 2017

Lawrence Durrell's Home in Alexandria Destroyed: The End of the Villa Ambron

19 September 2017
I have received the news tonight from Zahraa Adel Awad in Alexandria that the Villa Ambron where Lawrence Durrell lived from 1943 to 1945 was torn down yesterday, 19 September 2017.

In the octagonal tower of the villa Durrell wrote Prospero's Cell about Corfu and the first pages of what was to become Justine, which grew into The Alexandria Quartet.

Zahraa is a wonderful tour guide in Alexandria who takes a special interest in the city's cosmopolitan and literary past. Both photographs in this post were taken by her.  Thank you, Zahraa.

For more on the Villa Ambron and the long campaign to save it and to turn it into a museum of Alexandria's cosmopolitan past, see here.

June 2017









Wednesday 13 September 2017

Talking Templars

The Templars: History and Myth is now an audio book.
You can  now listen to The Templars: History and Myth by Michael Haag while washing the dishes, driving the car, or whatever.

The audio book runs for 11 hours unabridged and is available directly from the publisher Tantor in North America and via Amazon and other online outlets worldwide.

The reader is Guy Bethell, an Englishman who lives in Arizona.  For an audio sample of the book, click here.

Monday 4 September 2017

Tragedia templariuszy

Bestseller in Poland

Astra in Poland (Wydawnictwo Astra) have acquired the Polish rights to The Templars: History and Myth, following their publication last year of The Tragedy of the Templars which has become a bestseller. The Polish edition of The Templars: History and Myth will be published in 2018.