Lawrence Durrell

In "The Colossus of Maroussi," Henry Miller's book about Greece, he described Lawrence Durrell as "English despite himself, [and] in a quandary." Like Durrell, I have lived most of my life outside England and I too am in a quandary: I am pro-European in many respects, yet, having been born and educated in London I retain a strong sense of what it means to be English. Not British - English.

Lawrence Durrell described the condition of "islomania" as "a rare but by no means unknown affliction of the spirit" in people who find islands "irresistible." He was describing the psychological compulsion which drives many writers, in particular, to try to satisfy an inner need. Durrell's own "island books" include Corfu (where he discovered both Greece and himself), Rhodes and Cyprus.

"There is nothing that can be done about poor Greece. We are too poor. We have only a lot of rocks for sale. We can only exist on skillful borrowing." Sounds familiar? No, it isn't contemporary. It's a line from an unpublished novel by Lawrence Durrell, written in the 1960s but set in Greece in the early 1950s.