The Touch Of Durrell

"Jeremy was 'best' in ever sense of the world. His passion for animals, which is so delightfully revealed in this book, made him the perfect acolyte to Gerry's mission to save species from extinction." - Lee Durrell MBE.The Touch of Durell is packed full of gorgeous photos of gorillas, cheetahs and lion tamarins and is a celebration of a lifetime spent in conservation. For more than 30 years Jeremy Mallinson was Gerald Durrell's right-hand man at the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Widely regarded as a trailblazer in the world of conservation, he has devoted his life to the care and collection of endangered species.Becoming Director of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust after the death of Gerald Durrell, it is Mallinson's marvellous ability to relate to animals - and convey his enthusiasm for them to the rest of us with infectious vigour - that have made him such a powerful champion for wildlife around the world.During the mid-1950s, Jeremy Mallinson saw service in the regular army of the Federation of Rhodesia & Nyasaland (RNSC). On his return to his home in Jersey, and after having read Gerald Durrell's classic My Family and Other Animals , he joined the staff of Durrell's newly established Jersey Zoological Park in May 1959. During his 42 year career in zoos and conservation he studied animals in Africa, Asia and South America. He served as Gerald Durrell's Deputy, and then Zoological Director of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. After his mentor's death in 1995, he was appointed Director of the renamed Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.Jeremy has written more than 200 papers and articles, addressed conferences in over 20 different countries and is the author of 9 books. He has received many awards for his services to animal conservation worldwide, including the World Zoo Organisation's 'Heini Hediger Award'; the Zoological Society of San Diego's 'Gold Medal Award for Conservation'; and the IUCN/SSC/Conservation Planning Specialist Group's 'Ulysses S. Seal Innovation in Conservation Award'.

Collection of eight short stories by the author observing absurdity that abounds in the world.

In The Evolution of Gerald Durrell: A Naturalist's Critical Biography, Mary Sanders Pollock revisits the life and work of Gerald Durrell, one of the most significant environmentalist figures of the 20th century. This new biography tracks Durrell's evolution from a free-range childhood on Corfu through his time in Africa, South America, and the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Durrell's early work is described in his numerous travel narratives, but his conservation activities culminated in “the stationary ark,” a conservation zoo on the Isle of Jersey which still plays an important role in global wildlife conservation efforts. This biography situates Durrell's writing, collecting, and conservation practices within the frameworks of animal studies, conservation biology, and postcolonial history. Familiarizing readers with the broad range of his cultural impact, from The Corfu Trilogy to his BBC television specials, Pollock shows how Durrell's approach offers models for how life on earth is to thrive and survive: scientists must make greater efforts to touch hearts and minds, and cultural workers must communicate more about science and the perilous existence of other species.

'What we all need,' said Larry, 'is sunshine . . . a country where we can grow.' 'Yes, dear, that would be nice,' agreed Mother, not really listening. 'I had a letter from George this morning - he says Corfu's wonderful. Why don't we pack up and go to Greece?' 'Very well, dear, if you like,' said Mother unguardedly. Escaping the ills of the British climate, the Durrell family - acne-ridden Margo, gun-toting Leslie, bookworm Lawrence and budding naturalist Gerry, along with their long-suffering mother and Roger the dog - take off for the island of Corfu. But the Durrells find that, reluctantly, they must share their various villas with a menagerie of local fauna - among them scorpions, geckos, toads, bats and butterflies. Recounted with immense humour and charm My Family and Other Animals is a wonderful account of a rare, magical childhood. 'Durrell has an uncanny knack of discovering human as well as animal eccentricities' Sunday Telegraph

Through his use of Gnostic beliefs, Durrell destabilizes our notions of the "real" and suggests that the civilization to emerge out of the ruins of a devastated Europe will not be Christian, but Quincunxial. Durrell's aesthetic and thematic concerns establish him as a significant, indeed central, voice in twentieth-century British literature. His career, which spans over five decades, links the British High Modernists with the Postmodernists.

In this study of the influence of Indian metaphysics on Lawrence Durrell’s novels, Professor Nambiar offers a unique milestone in the history of Durrellian criticism. Embracing Durrell’s search for universal awareness through Western and Indian metaphysics, the book presents a new metaphysical reading of the writer’s prose that has remained untapped until now. Exploring Durrell’s quest for a new reality through fiction, Nambiar focuses in-depth on The Avignon Quintet and questions the complex symbolic patterns that shape the polymorphous characters’ peregrinations through space and time. With much subtlety, modesty and wit, Indian Metaphysics in Lawrence Durrell’s Novels opens up the mysterious doors of “the kingdom of the imagination”.

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of Lawrence Durrell’s entire poetic opus, from his early collections in the 1940s up to his last one published in 1973. Thirty years of Durrellian poetry are brought together in order to unveil the genesis of Durrell’s writing, both poetic and fictional, drawing links to his novels and residence books, which he kept writing at the same time. Durrell thus appears as first and foremost one of the greatest late modernist poets whose literary and epistemological investigations are to be understood in the light of a worldwide network of literary brotherhoods including T. S. Eliot, Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller, and David Gascoyne. Simultaneously, this book shows why Durrell must also be read as the heir to the greatest English romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth) as well as to the French symbolists and modernists (from Baudelaire to Nerval, Valéry, and Cendrars).This comparative approach opens up a brand new perspective on Durrell that has not yet been broached by North American and English scholarship. The symbolic patterns, the stylistic ploys, and the aesthetic and philosophic tenets that characterize Durrell’s poetics account for the necessary back-and-forth reading that connects prose and poetry, the fictional and the lyrical, the descriptive and the abstract. Poetry excerpts, extracts from his residence books, novels, and essays highlight not only Durrell’s complex literary strategies but also the ontological quest of a writer who, although never at home with the world he lived in, strove to create a life-world, what semiologists call the “Umwelt.”