Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel. This item is unavailable.Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

From one of the century's greatest storytellers comes a collection of essays that capture the "spirit of place"Lawrence Durrell's articles about Mediterranean and Aegean islands along with passages from his letters were first published in 1969. This reissue, with a new cover, is a tribute to Durrell's belief in the importance of capturing the essence of a place."My books are always about living in places, not just rushing through them.... the important determinant of any culture is after all -- the spirit of place".

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.