Curate's Egg on His Face: Mahmoud Manzalaoui's Attack on the Veracity of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet

Because he was Egyptian and from Alexandria and was an academic, Mahmoud Manazalaoui's attack on the veracity, the honesty,  of Lawrence Durrell's portrait of Alexandria has largely gone unchallenged in the academic world since he wrote his paper Curate's Egg: An Alexandrian Opinion of Durrell's Quartet in 1962.  Shamefully his views are still cited by uncritical academics today.  In fact Manzalaoui's opinion is nothing more than an ignorant rant written by a man who clearly knew next to nothing about the city he claimed as his own.

Click here to read my rejoinder, Egg on His Face, to Manzalaoui (sometimes misspelt Manzaloui).

And click here to read Manzalaoui's original Curate's Egg.