Durrell centenary

Lawrence Durrell was born exactly a century ago, on 27 February 1912, in British India, where his parents were colonial expatriates.

He spent a few years at a secondary school in England, and then moved to the shores of the Mediterranean, where he spent his life as a poet and novelist.

I've evoked this great writer in several blog posts:

• First encounter with Lawrence Durrell [display]

• Back in touch with Durrell [display]

• Phantoms of a lost paradise [display]

• Old house in Sommières [display]

As an adoptive Provençal, with a profound awareness of the history and culture of that magnificent region, he would have been fascinated by this marble bust of Julius Caesar.

But Durrell died at Sommières in 1990, and it was only in 2008 that Caesar's splendid bust was discovered in the murky waters of the Rhône at Arles.