Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life - Softcover

Durrell, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571056679 ISBN 13: 9780571056675

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1976

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Synopsis:

The author and Antrobus, a career diplomat, recount humorous stories about their foreign service experiences in Yugoslavia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0571056679
• ISBN 13: 9780571056675
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96