Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

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He settles into a dilapidated villa, and with his poet's eye for beauty - and passable Greek - vividly captures the moods and atmospheres of island life in a changing world. The only moral of the story I can draw out of it, is that wherever Britain tried to empire build they screwed up due to a kind of self satisfied blindness. Durrell insisted that the Greeks were Europeans and hence merited being dealt with by the Foreign Office not the Colonial Office. TV documentary maker Simon Reeve has dodged bullets on frontlines, hunted with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, dived with manta rays, seals and sharks, survived malaria, walked through minefields, tracked lions on foot, been taught to fish by the President of Moldova, and detained for spying by the KGB. He perceives the Cypriot desire for Enosis as a vague goal the residents love to ponder and discuss, but one stirred into violent ferver only by agitation and arms from political zealots in Greece.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads

It had already circulated, or been passed back and forth between great powers, East and West, many times. Ah, all those silly, hilarious things that simple, ignorant, overtly gesticulating, lovely, loud and poor folk did. Then, in keeping with brief references in his little brother's book, he picks a high point in his house to slowly eat grapes and crack the whip on Greek workmen who may be lingering to tell the stories he loves so much.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.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island

Please, kindly notice how cunning I am acting among the beasts though sometimes I am beyond perplexed with their barbarously goofy acts. For all my enjoyment of this very fine read I suspect that like another author I admire, Patrick Leigh Fermor, I may not be in agreement with a few of his views.The time Lawrence spent with his family, mother Louisa, siblings Leslie, Margaret Durrell, and Gerald Durrell, on the island of Corfu were the subject of Gerald's memoirs and have been filmed numerous times for TV. In 1953, as the British Empire relaxes its grip upon the world, the island of Cyprus bucks for independence.

Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell | Goodreads

Well he did; "As a conservative, I fully understand, namely; 'If you have an Empire, you just can't give away bits of it as soon as asked. as a child I could not go to the beach without someoone pointing to the very top of a mountaintop to say, “there, there is where he lived” needless to say, everyone knew that was Durell’s home. What does amaze one however is that the Turks, perhaps through lack of a definite cultural pattern of their own, or of one worth imposing on the Greeks, left them freedom of religion, language and even local government- and indeed vested in them a large part of the Imperial administration: a recognition perhaps of the enviable qualities of restlessness and imagination which they themselves lacked. It became a bit dry somewhere along the way, but that can't be helped considering it had to delve into history. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell’s unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule.The area Durrell lived in was captured by the Turkish government in 1974, so that means his primarily Greek Cypriot neighbors would have been abruptly forced to leave their homes and flee south.