Books & Authors

Polizaiano translated Homer.  He wrote a great poem on Simonetta Vespucci, you know her?

No said Hana, laughing.

Paintings of her all over Florence.  Died of consumption at twenty-three.  He made her famous with Le Stanze per la Giostra and then Botticelli painted scenes from it.

The tales Hana had read to the English patient, travelling with the old wanderer in Kim or with Fabrizio in The Charterhouse of Parma, had intoxicated them in a swirl of armies and horses and wagons - those running away from or running towards a war.

When she begins a book she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards. Parma and Paris and India spread their carpets.

"In 1942 the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used as copy of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements." 

In spite of being  Lord Suffolk he lived in Devon, and until the war broke out his passion was the study of Lorna Doone and how authentic the novel was historically and geographically.

She watched him sternly.  An Indian boy.  He smiled and walked towards the bookshelves.  Again he touched nothing.  At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Lodge.  He found another similar title. Pierre, or the Ambiguities.  He turned and caught the woman's eyes on him again.  He felt as guilty as if he had put the book in his pocket.

   

                                                                                                           I carried Herodotus and Madoxa - a saint in his own marriage - carried Anna Karenina, continually rereading the story of romance and deceit.