The Villa Ariadne

Author: Dilys Powell
Publisher: Eland Publishing
ISBN: 9781780600352
Category : Crete (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Villa Ariadne was built at Knossos, Crete, by Sir Arthur Evans soon after he discovered the Minoan palace, when the site was his own private property. The villa became home, in turn, to John Pendlebury, who used it as a base for his excavations at Knossos and his explorations of the island.After Pendlebury's death at the hands of invading German paratroopers, the Villa Ariadne was taken over by General Karl Kreipe, who was living there when he was kidnapped by Patrick Leigh Fermor and marched across the island to captivity, an episode immortalized in the film Ill Met by Moonlight.Dilys Powell, who knew Crete and the Villa Ariadne for over 40 years, weaves her own memories of Evans and Pendlebury together with recollections of the Cretan people. Her classic account, first published in 1973, is at once a chapter of autobiography and a portrait of a mythical island which captured her heart. It should appeal to all those who share her love for Greece and especially Crete.

Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

Author: Cathy Gere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226289559
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints an unforgettable portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.

An Affair of the Heart

Author: Dilys Powell
Publisher: Eland Publishing
ISBN: 9781780601564
Category : Perachōra (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Dilys Powell's love affair with Greece and the Greeks began on a sun-baked archaeological dig in 1931. Joining her husband the archaeologist Humfry Payne on the remote peninsula of Perachora, she came to know the villagers who labored on the site, camping beside them year after year, for months at a time. Despite personal tragedy, the occupation of Greece and civil war, Powell's affair of the heart continued. She returned time and again through the '40s and '50s, and with each visit there was a reconciliation with her idyllic memories of the country. Both with Humfry and without, she explored remote mountains in the company of shepherds, isolated stretches of coast and island with local fishermen and olive-dotted hillsides with the subsistence farmers who worked them. Out of this she has fashioned a gem of a travel book.

Islands of the Mind

Author: Richard Pine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527546616
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
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.

Villa of Delirium

Author: Adrien Goetz
Publisher: New Vessel Press
ISBN: 1939931819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
"Terrific."—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes and Letters to Camondo "Makes you want to travel, do somersaults and stretches, drink champagne in evening dress, read, think ... Intoxicating."—Publishers Weekly Along the French Riviera in the early 1900s, an illustrious family in thrall to classical antiquity builds a fabulous villa—a replica of a Greek palace, complete with marble columns and frescoes depicting mythological gods. The Reinachs--related to other wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis—attempt to recreate a "pure beauty" lost in the 20th century. The narrator of this brilliant novel calls the imposing house an act of delirium, "proof that one could travel back in time, just like resetting a clock, and resist the outside world." The story of the villa and its glamorous inhabitants is recounted by the son of a servant from the nearby estate of Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and the two contrasting structures present opposite responses to modernity. The son is adopted by the Reinachs, initiated into the era of Socrates and instructed in classical Greek. He joins a family pilgrimage to Athens, falls in love with a married woman, and survives the Nazi confiscation of the house and deportation to death camps of Reinach grandchildren. This is a Greek epic for the modern era.

The Heraldic World of Lawrence Durrell

Author: Bruce Redwine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527578925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
Lawrence Durrell’s position as one of the twentieth century’s leading novelists is continually being enlarged and revised. This book presents unusual and unorthodox explorations of Alexandria, the city at the heart of Durrell’s writing, his family relationships, his biographer Michael Haag, and his affinity with such diverse writers as Rilke and Virgil. In particular, it offers an insight into Durrell’s emotions and sensibilities in elaborating his Sicilian Carousel and a penetrating and totally unique reading of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in the light of the art and landscape of ancient Egypt.

Abducting a General

Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590179390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
One of the most daring feats in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s daring life was the kidnapping of General Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, on April 26, 1944. Abducting a General, now published for the first time in the United States, is Leigh Fermor’s own account of the kidnapping. Written in his inimitable prose, and introduced by the acclaimed Special Operations Executive historian Roderick Bailey, it is a glorious firsthand account of one of the great adventures of the Second World War. Also included in this book are Leigh Fermor’s intelligence reports sent from caves deep within Crete, which bring the immediacy of SOE operations vividly alive, as well as the peril under which the SOE and Resistance were operating, and a guide to the journey that Kreipe took, from the abandonment of his car to the embarkation site, so that the modern visitor to Crete can relive this extraordinary trip.

Great Moments in Greek Archaeology

Author: Panos Valavanēs
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 9780892369102
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
This beautifully illustrated book offers a wide-ranging overview of the greatest archaeological sites and discoveries from ancient Greece. The contributors--a veritable who's who of the most venerable names in Greek archaeology--include both those who have excavated at the sites in question and scholars who have spent a lifetime studying the monuments about which they write. Presented here are the legendary sites of ancient Greece, including the Athenian Acropolis, Olympia, Delphi, Schliemann's Mycenae, and the Athenian Agora; the most iconic sculptures in the Greek world, such as the Aphrodite of Melos and the Nike of Samothrace; and several fascinating chapters on underwater archaeology discussing the Kyrenia and Uluburun shipwrecks and the astonishing bronze masterpieces raised from the sea. This is the first book to bring together the archaeological legacy of ancient Greece in a concise and accessible way while still preserving the excitement of discovery.

Natural Born Heroes

Author: Christopher McDougall
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307594963
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
Used by CrossFit and the late Bruce Lee, the 'Natural Movement' trend is poised to revolutionise the way we think about strength, fitness and our own bodies. In this book, Chris McDougall takes us to pioneering research laboratories in Germany, an assault course in the Brazilian jungle and Parisian parkour routes, exploding common exercise myths.

Ariadne's Children

Author: Roderick Beaton
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312304577
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
An Englishman sets out for an ancient Greek palace in Crete to clear his family's name. The man's father and grandfather excavated it and they have been accused by the archeological community of fabricating artifacts. A first novel.