Esprit de Corps

Imagine if P.G.Wodehouse was a diplomat: Durrell's hilarious foreign office sketches are 'sophisticated funny, but wonderful, and bonkers' (Joanna Trollope) 'A rewarding cocktail based on two parts Wodehouse and one part Saki ... So much fun.' New York Times '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 After a lifetime serving that most delightfully British of institutions, the Foreign Office, Antrobus can't resist musing over old times in Vulgaria at his London club - or should that be cringing ... Rankled by farcical gaffes and absurd misadventures, from Yugoslav ghost trains to disastrous misprints ('The Balkan Herald Keeps the British Flag Frying'), these delicious sketches lampoon English etiquette, empire, and eccentricity. Celebrated British novelist, travel writer, and member of the real-life family portrayed in The Durrells in Corfu, Lawrence Durrell experienced the absurdities of mid-century diplomacy firsthand. His charming jeu d'esprit about the diplomatic corps is classic satire: but be warned: there's a point where laughter can become painful ... 'My goodness it is funny.' Daily Telegraph 'Uproariously funny and shrewd ... With the arrows of farce and of satire, he is on the target again and again.' Evening Standard

Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals - later filmed as The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands. Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.