Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

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'How pleasant.to meet Mr Durrell, gloating over his enjoyment of a Greek island! His book is too various to be summarised: it expresses a poet's intoxication with landscape, a humanist's appetite for history, and an eye for character worthy of a novelist. He is witty, he is shrewd, he is effectively eloquent. He wafts us over a lively range of periods and subjects, communicating his gusto for Greek ruins, wild flowers, Patmian monks, forged bus tickets, the violet, alluring sea, and pilgrimages embellished by traditional dancing beside barbecues.He excites a longing to leave for Rhodes at once.'

Raymond Mortimer, Sunday Times

Author Bio

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, 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 befo