Page 7 - Patrick Leigh News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

by Ian Collins (Yale £25, 384 pp) At last! An artist who had a happy childhood! The Craxtons of 8 Grove End Road, St John’s Wood sound like a delightfully bohemian 1920s bunch: musical parents, five sons, one daughter, piano played, trees climbed, guests visiting for a week and staying for four years, family holidays spent in a converted Army hut on the beach in Sussex. The only fly in the ointment was that fourth son John — the subject of Ian Collins’s evocative biography of the artist whom we most associate with Greece —was detested by his elder brother Antony. John was dreamy, del...

Viaje a Grecia CULTURA/S Una aproximación al país heleno con algunas obras literarias que recrearon su magia, De Platón a Kazantzakis o Gerald Durrell   Cristina Spanò En las líneas finales de su breve ensayo On not knowing Greek (1925), Virginia Woolf escribió que regresamos a los griegos cuando estamos cansados de la vaguedad y de la confusión de nuestra época. Desde los quince años la autora británica había dedicado muchas horas y esfuerzos a aprender el griego clásico. En aquella antigua lengua descubrió una visión del mundo bella y elegante; una manera compleja de aprehe...

Xu Xi, novelist Xu Xi is in the habit of dividing her time between New York, Hong Kong and, well, the world, and has long advocated a "transnational approach" to literature. Sequestered in upstate New York during the pandemic, she hasn't found adapting to sedentary life easy. And, she says, she longs for Southeast Asia. "Although I was born in Hong Kong, I travelled for years on an Indonesian passport, which was funny because I couldn't speak...

“PEOPLE say that the sign of a thriving town is to have an independent bookshop on the high street,” says Mike Sansbury, manager of The Grove Bookshop, which for more than 40 years has sat proudly on its corner spot in Ilkley’s most well-known and elegant street. “If not an independent bookshop then Waterstones is the next best thing. A bookshop brings together people who all have different interests to browse and buy books. There is a special atmosphere in a bookshop.” Opened in November 1979 by local couple Mr and Mrs Townson - who were determined that it should be on The Gr...

I met him only once. It was 21 years ago, in Athens, Greece, on the occasion of a speech he gave growing out of his wartime exploits as a British special agent serving with Greek resistance fighters in German-occupied Crete. At the time of the talk he was a world-famous author, traveler, and cultural and historical polymath. And what should have been, for me, the pleasure of a long-anticipated conversation about his singular brand of literary magic turned instead to dismay and embarrassment on my part and obvious anger on his over a question I had put to him. His name was Patrick Leigh Fermor...