Fiancés, friends, and other animals. . . After a year that sees a broken-off engagement and the death of her beloved father, Penny is desperate to get away. Fulfilling a childhood dream, she sets off on a month-long pilgrimage to Corfu--an island idyll she knows only through the pages of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. On the island, Penny quickly finds herself drawn into the lives of a tight-knit circle of strangers. Exploring--searching for the places the Durrells knew decades before--she makes unexpected discoveries about the hopes, fears, and secrets of the people living there today. And as strangers start to be friends, lives past and present become entwined in ways none of them could have predicted. . .

The Durrell family are immortalised in Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals and its ITV adaptation, The Durrells. But what of the real life Durrells? Why did they go to Corfu in the first place - and what happened to them after they left? The real story of the Durrells is as surprising and fascinating as anything in Gerry's books, and Michael Haag, with his first hand knowledge of the family, is the ideal narrator, drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished autobiographical fragments. The Durrells of Corfu describes the family's upbringing in India and the crisis that brought them to England and then Greece. It recalls the genuine characters they encountered on Corfu - Theodore the biologist, the taxi driver Spiro Halikiopoulos and the prisoner Kosti - as well as the visit of American writer Henry Miller. And Haag has unearthed the story of how the Durrells left Corfu, including Margo's and Larry's last-minute escapes before the War. An extended epilogue looks at the emergence of Larry as a world famous novelist, and Gerry as a naturalist and champion of endangered species, as well as the lives of the rest of the family, their friends and other animals. The book is illustrated with family photos from the Gerald Durrell Archive, many of them reproduced here for the first time.

'We lolled in the sea until it was time to return for tea, another of Mother's gastronomic triumphs. Tottering mounds of hot scones; crisp paper-thin biscuits; cakes like snowdrifts, oozing jam; cakes dark, rich and moist, crammed with fruit; brandy snaps brittle as coral and overflowing with honey. Conversation was almost at a standstill; all that could be heard was the gentle tinkle of cups, and the heartfelt sigh of some guest, accepting another slice of cake.' - My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell In Dining with the Durrells, David Shimwell has delved into the Durrell family archives to uncover Louisa Durrell's original recipes for the scones, cakes, jams, tarts, sandwiches and more that are so deliciously described by the Durrell family. From her recipe for 'Gerry's Favourite Chicken Curry' to 'Dixie-Durrell Scones with Fig and Ginger Jam', and including the family stories and photos that accompany them, this book will transport you to long lunches enjoyed on the terrace of a strawberry-pink villa, sunshine-filled picnics among the Corfu olive groves and candlelit dinners overlooking the Ionian Sea.

The prize-winning biography of the celebrated author of the Alexandria Quartet and the Avignon Quintet: an “elegant and meticulous . . . treat” (Kirkus Reviews). A New York Times Notable Book Born in colonial India in 1912, Lawrence Durrell established his literary reputation as a citizen of the Mediterranean. After attending school in England, Durrell escaped the country he dubbed “Pudding Island” for the Greek island of Corfu, only to make another escape—this time from Nazi invasion—to Egypt. His experiences in wartime Alexandria led to a quartet of novels, beginning with Justine, that are collectively considered some of the great masterpieces of postwar fiction. Durrell’s peripatetic life, which eventually took him to the South of France, fed his work with the richness and drama of his various adoptive homes. A man of protean talents, Durrell is celebrated for his fiction and poetry, as well has his highly regarded translations, essays, and travel literature. In researching this authorized biography, Ian S. MacNiven traveled over a period of twenty years from India to California, interviewing hundreds of individuals and visiting all but one of the many places Durrell lived. The result is an intimate portrait of a literary titan that was awarded a prize by the French city of Antibes for the year’s best study on Durrell.

This book explores the history of wildlife television in post-war Britain. It revolves around the role of David Attenborough, whose career as a broadcaster and natural history filmmaker has shaped British wildlife television. The book discusses aspects of Attenborough’s professional biography and also explores elements of the institutional history of the BBC—from the early 1960s, when it was at its most powerful, to the 2000s, when its future is uncertain. It focuses primarily on the wildlife ‘making-of’ documentary genre, which is used to trace how television progressively became a participant in the production of knowledge about nature. With the inclusion of analysis of television programmes, first-hand accounts, BBC archival material and, most notably, interviews with David Attenborough, this volume follows the development of the professional culture of wildlife broadcasting as it has been portrayed in public. It will be of interest to wildlife television amateurs, historians of British television and students in science communication.

This edition does not include illustrations. The authorised biography of the great naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell, who died aged seventy in January 1995 in Jersey, where he founded the zoo he’d dreamed of as a small boy and pioneered the captive breeding of animals for conservation.

"In a world like this one, it's difficult to devote oneself to art body and soul. To get published, to get exhibited, to get produced often requires ten or twenty years of patient, intense labor. I spent half my life at it! And how do you survive during all that time? Beg? Live off other people until you're successful? What a dog's life! I know something about that! You're always recognized too late. And today, it's no longer enough to have talent, originality, to write a good or beautiful book. One must be inspired! Not only touch the public but create one's own public. Otherwise, you're headed straight for suicide." That's Henry Miller's advice for young aspiring artists, as remembered by his very good friend Brassaï in this lively book. One of two that Brassaï wrote about the man who called himself a "happy rock," this volume covers their lives and friendship from the 1950s to 1973. Over the course of a number of warm, intimate conversations, Brassaï and Miller revisit their careers; discuss art, literature, Paris, Greece, Japan, World War II, and more; and consider the lives and works of many others in their circle, including Lawrence Durrell, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Georges Simenon, André Malraux, Hans Reichel, Paul Klee, and Amedeo Modigliani. Throughout Miller's zest for life shines through, as do his love of art and his passionate intensity for just about everything he does, from discussing a movie or play he'd just seen to reminiscing about a decades-long love. Brassaï's Henry Miller, Happy Rock presents a vivid portrait of two close friends who thoroughly enjoy each other's company—and just happen to be world—famous artists too.

730 million people—almost 10% of the world’s population—inhabit islands. One quarter of the states represented at the United Nations are islands. Islands constitute almost twenty percent of the total land area of Greece, and exhibit more significant aspects of biodiversity than other global contexts. They are both occasions of triumph and occurrences of catastrophe. Islands are both open and enclosed communities, points of arrival and departure. Islands exert a fascination for the visitor and generate, in the islander, both positive and negative mindsets. The romantic fallacies about self-sufficiency and insularity of islands are constantly challenged. This collection of essays by scholars from some of the world’s most compelling islands—Jersey, Ireland, Tasmania, Corfu, Ereikousa, Prince Edward Island, Malta—explores the psychology of islands, islanders and their visitors, the literatures they stimulate, and the scientific, ethical and biogeographical issues they present in an increasingly globalised world. Corfu, the home of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell in the 1930s, and host to literary and scientific enquiry, is the place where this collection was conceived, and occupies a central place in its discussions.

From the Pharaohs to Fanon, Dictionary of African Biography provides a comprehensive overview of the lives of the men and women who shaped Africa's history. Unprecedented in scale, DAB covers the whole continent from Tunisia to South Africa, from Sierra Leone to Somalia. It also encompasses the full scope of history from Queen Hatsheput of Egypt (1490-1468 BC) and Hannibal, the military commander and strategist of Carthage (243-183 BC), to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909-1972), Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (1918 -).