Latest news with #EMForster
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Constantine Cavafy' Review: A Poet's Odyssey Within
The Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) never published a book, yet today no anthology of world poetry can afford to neglect him. He was great poet of history, psychology and erotic yearning. His meticulous verses of beauty and folly, delusion and disillusioned wryness, were forged from his reading and his private life as a homosexual—experiences he rendered with a jaded power. His friend E.M. Forster once described him as 'a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.' Cavafy, who lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, remains the most influential of all modern Greek poets. Yet it is a miracle we know his work at all. He self-published individual poems in broadsides distributed to friends and family, occasionally binding small collections in limited editions. The first Greek edition of his poems appeared in 1935, two years after Cavafy's death. His work was composed exclusively in Greek, a language he spoke with an English accent (he was a subject of both the Ottoman and British empires). He was not a nationalist, but a poet of singular vision. It was a vision with global appeal. In the 1920s, T.S. Eliot published early translations of Cavafy in his literary magazine the Criterion, which deeply influenced younger writers such as W.H. Auden. Finally, in 1951, the Hogarth Press would bring out a collected edition of Cavafy's poems rendered in English. The canon grew through new editions and translations, until Cavafy became, as Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys assert in 'Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography,' a 'world poet.' His most beloved poem, 'Ithaca' (1911), which revises the voyage of Odysseus as a parable of life's journey, can be found everywhere on the internet:
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell by Michael Haag review
Spirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. 'Spirit of Place', though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell's literary output: Prospero's Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations. It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag's best book was Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which drew on the writings of Cavafy, EM Forster and Durrell to reconstruct the polyglot culture of the Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arabic population that flourished for centuries on the shores of north Africa. By the time of his own death in 2020, Haag had completed this biography of Durrell up to the year 1945, and the decision was made to publish posthumously. The result reads like an abbreviated account of Durrell's life rather than an amputation: despite not becoming a significant literary figure until 1957, most of Durrell's formative experiences had taken place by the time he left the city at the end of the war. Haag's insistence on treating place not just as a matter of landscape but also as social nexus provides new insights into Durrell's earliest years. The standard version has always been that his family was Anglo-Indian, with parents who were ethnic Britons living and working during the Raj while longing continually for 'home'. Lawrence Durrell Sr was even that quintessential figure, a civil engineer, at work on the railways that were joining up the subcontinent. Yet Haag's forensic analysis reveals that the Durrell family was located very far down colonial India's pecking order. Both Lawrence Sr and his wife, Louisa Dixie, were 'country born' in the Punjab, with only tenuous connections to Britain. On Louisa's side there may have been Indian blood. The decision not to automatically send the four surviving Durrell children back to 'Blighty' (a corrupted Urdu word) for their education likewise marked the family out as being perilously close to the Eurasians who made up colonial India's subaltern class. Haag is also able to put to rest some of Durrell's more outrageous fibs. It is not true that his family was Irish – he probably just liked the way it made him seem not-English. Nor, in his boarding school in Darjeeling, could young Larry see Everest from the foot of his bed: the windows of his dormitory looked out on to dreary playing fields. Such misdirections were perhaps an attempt to disguise a childhood that was distinctly troubled. Louisa – 'Mother' in My Family and Other Animals (1956), by younger brother Gerry – had already started her descent into full-blown alcoholism, an addiction she passed on to all three of her sons. Haag has dealt before with the Corfu idyll in The Durrells of Corfu (2017), but in this retelling he reminds us that even in Eden things were not always as they seemed. On the island, the Durrells were socially suspect: the gentry class found them rough and boorish, while the priests and peasants were deeply offended by their insistence on swimming in the nude without worrying who saw them. This biography inevitably comes into its own once Larry touches down in Alexandria in 1942 as the newly appointed press attache to the British embassy. Haag's descriptions of the city's melting-pot culture and its steamy eroticism are wonderfully done. It was here that Larry met Eve Cohen, the model for Justine in the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, who became his second wife. Durrell's previous biographer Ian MacNiven was in the tricky position of having been invited by his subject to write the book, for which he would be given access to private papers. The result was both overlong and overawed. Haag doesn't set out to do a hatchet job, but he is clearer on Durrell's dark side. The puckish author, no more than 5ft 4in tall, was free with his fists, snobbish and racist (Eve's Jewishness seemed both to intrigue and repel him). The book's cut-off point of 1945 means that later accusations by Durrell's daughter Sappho that he compelled her into an incestuous relationship are not explored. She killed herself at the age of 33. Missing, too, is any assessment of where Lawrence Durrell's literary reputation currently stands. In truth, he is not much read or liked now, his books coming over as bloated and cod-metaphysical in a way no amount of gorgeous phrase-making can quite redeem. Durrell's time may come again, but at this point we will have to be satisfied with Haag's account of him as a supreme writer of place, rather than as an astute investigator of the human condition or, even less persuasively, an overlooked modernist master. Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-1945 by Michael Haag is published by Profile Books (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
02-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell by Michael Haag review
Spirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. 'Spirit of Place', though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell's literary output: Prospero's Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations. It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag's best book was Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which drew on the writings of Cavafy, EM Forster and Durrell to reconstruct the polyglot culture of the Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arabic population that flourished for centuries on the shores of north Africa. By the time of his own death in 2020, Haag had completed this biography of Durrell up to the year 1945, and the decision was made to publish posthumously. The result reads like an abbreviated account of Durrell's life rather than an amputation: despite not becoming a significant literary figure until 1957, most of Durrell's formative experiences had taken place by the time he left the city at the end of the war. Haag's insistence on treating place not just as a matter of landscape but also as social nexus provides new insights into Durrell's earliest years. The standard version has always been that his family was Anglo-Indian, with parents who were ethnic Britons living and working during the Raj while longing continually for 'home'. Lawrence Durrell Sr was even that quintessential figure, a civil engineer, at work on the railways that were joining up the subcontinent. Yet Haag's forensic analysis reveals that the Durrell family was located very far down colonial India's pecking order. Both Lawrence Sr and his wife, Louisa Dixie, were 'country born' in the Punjab, with only tenuous connections to Britain. On Louisa's side there may have been Indian blood. The decision not to automatically send the four surviving Durrell children back to 'Blighty' (a corrupted Urdu word) for their education likewise marked the family out as being perilously close to the Eurasians who made up colonial India's subaltern class. Haag is also able to put to rest some of Durrell's more outrageous fibs. It is not true that his family was Irish – he probably just liked the way it made him seem not-English. Nor, in his boarding school in Darjeeling, could young Larry see Everest from the foot of his bed: the windows of his dormitory looked out on to dreary playing fields. Such misdirections were perhaps an attempt to disguise a childhood that was distinctly troubled. Louisa – 'Mother' in My Family and Other Animals (1956), by younger brother Gerry – had already started her descent into full-blown alcoholism, an addiction she passed on to all three of her sons. Haag has dealt before with the Corfu idyll in The Durrells of Corfu (2017), but in this retelling he reminds us that even in Eden things were not always as they seemed. On the island, the Durrells were socially suspect: the gentry class found them rough and boorish, while the priests and peasants were deeply offended by their insistence on swimming in the nude without worrying who saw them. This biography inevitably comes into its own once Larry touches down in Alexandria in 1942 as the newly appointed press attache to the British embassy. Haag's descriptions of the city's melting-pot culture and its steamy eroticism are wonderfully done. It was here that Larry met Eve Cohen, the model for Justine in the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, who became his second wife. Durrell's previous biographer Ian MacNiven was in the tricky position of having been invited by his subject to write the book, for which he would be given access to private papers. The result was both overlong and overawed. Haag doesn't set out to do a hatchet job, but he is clearer on Durrell's dark side. The puckish author, no more than 5ft 4in tall, was free with his fists, snobbish and racist (Eve's Jewishness seemed both to intrigue and repel him). The book's cut-off point of 1945 means that later accusations by Durrell's daughter Sappho that he compelled her into an incestuous relationship are not explored. She killed herself at the age of 33. Missing, too, is any assessment of where Lawrence Durrell's literary reputation currently stands. In truth, he is not much read or liked now, his books coming over as bloated and cod-metaphysical in a way no amount of gorgeous phrase-making can quite redeem. Durrell's time may come again, but at this point we will have to be satisfied with Haag's account of him as a supreme writer of place, rather than as an astute investigator of the human condition or, even less persuasively, an overlooked modernist master. Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-1945 by Michael Haag is published by Profile Books (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Codebreaker Alan Turing's scientific papers sell for ‘record' £465,000
Scientific papers belonging to the Second World War codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing which were nearly shredded after being discovered in a loft have sold for a total of £465,400 at auction. The archive of papers belonging to the mathematician, including a signed personal copy of his 1939 PhD dissertation, Systems Of Logic Based On Ordinals and On Computable Numbers from 1937, described as the first programming manual of the computer age, were sold on Tuesday, Hansons Auctioneers said. The archive, which sold for what is thought to be a record sum for such Turing material, had originally been gifted to Turing's friend and fellow mathematician, Norman Routledge, by Turing's mother, Ethel. The papers, known as 'offprints', were produced in small numbers and distributed within academia, making them rare survivors. Routledge kept the papers, which also included letters from the novelist EM Forster, and on his death they were taken to a relative's loft after his home in Bermondsey, London, was cleared out. One of Routledge's nieces previously said: 'When (Routledge) died in 2013, two of his sisters had the unenviable task of sorting through and emptying the contents. 'There were lots of personal papers which one sister carted away and stored in her loft. The papers lay dormant until she moved into a care home almost a decade later. 'Her daughters came across the papers and considered shredding everything. Fortunately, they checked with Norman's nieces and nephews because he'd always been a presence in our lives.' Auctioneers had estimated the lots would sell for £40,000 to £60,000 each, but On Computable Numbers alone sold for £208,000, Hansons said. Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals sold for another £110,500, with bidders on phones, online and in person at Rare Book Auctions, part of Hansons, in Lichfield, Staffordshire. The collection also included The Chemical Basis Of Morphogenesis, which sold for £19,500. Dating from 1952, it is Turing's lesser-known masterpiece of mathematical biology and his last major published work. Meanwhile, a single piece of paper which was Turing's first published paper in 1935, called Equivalence Of Left And Right Almost Periodicity, sold for £7,800. It was also gifted to Routledge by Turing's mother and her handwritten letter dated May 16 1956 was included. The letter reads: 'I have to-day sent by registered post 13 of Alan's off-prints … I have had some requests to write a biography of Alan … I have masses of material because from the time he was about 6 I spotted a winner – despite many detractors at school – and kept many papers about him.' Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, said of the papers, which were brought to experts in a carrier bag: 'Nothing could've prepared me for what I found in that carrier bag. 'These plain, academic papers were absolutely electrifying – they are the very bedrock of modern computing. Handling them was both humbling and haunting. 'Knowing the tragic arc of Turing's life only adds to the emotional weight. He was treated appallingly despite all he had done and yet, here, his ideas remain alive, relevant, and revolutionary.' Mr Spencer added: 'This was the most important archive I've ever handled. The papers came within inches of being destroyed, and instead they've captured the world's imagination. 'It's a once-in-a-lifetime discovery – not just for collectors, but for the sake of preserving the story of one of the greatest minds in history.' Turing, who is widely regarded as the father of computing science, played a central role in breaking the Enigma code, used by the Nazis during the Second World War. After the war, he was convicted of being involved in homosexual acts and took his own life in 1954, aged 41.
Time of India
08-06-2025
- Time of India
Holiday CRush
Times of India's Edit Page team comprises senior journalists with wide-ranging interests who debate and opine on the news and issues of the day. Supposing a song, book, movie pulls a tourist to India, how might this journey go? Perhaps nothing gladdens an ersatz desi heart more than a Western ode to Indian beauty. All the complexities of that EM Forster novel about that cave are nothing in comparison to how it continues to send the odd traveller our way. That one Odissi dancer in one Michael Jackson video is never to be forgotten. More current examples of course result in convulsions of joy. Wes Anderson to Coldplay, we scan any India-ish creation with a Sherlock magnifying glass. Did you spot Jodhpur's Mehrangarh fort or this spice bazaar or jhumka gali or that Varanasi ghat or Worli gaon? Ed Sheeran's new song Sapphire has also sent the socials on this look, don't miss, hunt. As a solidly underperforming tourist destination, India can really do with this kind of free advertising. It's one thing to be totally overshadowed by France, quite another by petite Dubai with nary a world heritage site. Even domestic tourists have begun switching their Goa bookings to Hanoi, Phuket, Bali and Siem Reap. Hence any global song, book, movie pitching Destination India sparking a national amour propre is logical. But supposing tourists far and near do hark the invite and do hoof over, it still may not, sadly, make for a fairy tale. As Abhijit Banerjee has written in TOI, we may be a very big country, but most tourists don't seem to know that. Crowds gravitate to the same historical ports of call, the same hill stations, the same beaches. For the most part, authorities don't even try to moderate the overcrowding, whether it means pollution turning ancient marble to grey or stacked monstrosities destabilising Himalayan mountains, which means tourists having a poor to dangerous experience. Full circle then, the tourist will curse the song, book, movie that made the nightmare look like a dream. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.
