Past Perfect: The Omphalos and the Oracle

“You have two birth-places,” wrote the 20th-century novelist Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), “the place where you were really born and … a place of predilection where you really wake up to reality.” Really born to Anglo-Irish parents in India, Durrell was shipped off to school in England. Unable to adjust to the regimentation of formal education, he attended one school after another before eventually failing his university entrance exams. Armed with a small inheritance from his father, he began playing jazz piano in a London nightclub and writing novels. In 1935 he pulled up stakes and moved to the island […]