Lawrence Durrell: the best Internet links

Here's the best URLs I could find on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. The sites I've appended (all but Trueheart's 2007 commemoration fifty years after the AQ) have appeared to mark his birth centenary in 2012 since the "Inventions of Spring" site below was compiled. No annotated reading guide in detail seems to exist online (or in print); neither wiki nor reader-friendly site serves AQ readers. Pat Harrigan's site, to which I've contributed these URLs and where they're posted elegantly (along with useful links to the Johnston College Buffalo Books FB project and to Amazon on LD) may assist collaborative readers, on or off the Net. See the Durrell Society and, focusing too on brother Gerald, a Corfu summer school.

One of the "workpoints" appended to Justine directs us to AQ's orientation. "Pursewarden on the ‘n-dimensional novel’ trilogy: ‘The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of the future racing towards one. Anyway, that was my idea.’…"
Inventions of Spring

 (I've corrected a link from the above to) Charles Trueheart. "A Seductive Spectacle." The American Scholar
 

Jim Crace: "Book of a Lifetime" The Independent


Joanna Hodgkin: "Lawrence Durrell at 100" (podcast).  The Guardian

 Tim Marlow: "Lawrence Durrell: Forgetting a Revolutionary" (podcast). BBC 

 Jan Morris: "Rereading Lawrence Durrell"  The Guardian

Penguin Reading Guide for Justine

Photo: The hardcover originals are famed for their striking iconography (seen on the Harrigan site) but I also like these Pocket Books Cardinal vintage paperbacks, which have their own period charm with the faces/veils of exotic protagonists. Today's Penguins can't compete: dull vistas, blah fonts, self-consciously oblique angles.