THE VILLA ARIADNE BY DILYS POWELL
€ 12.80 excl VAT
The Villa Ariadne by Dilys Powell brings to life the excavations at the ruins of Knossos in Crete.
The Villa Ariadne stands above the Minoan ruins of Knossos in Crete, a memorial to the British archaeologists who built, lived and worked there. Dilys Powell brings to life the autocratic founder Arthur Evans and his successor John Pendlebury, whose heroic leadership of the local defence against German invasion in 1941 made him a legend. The villa was also the site of the daring kidnap of German General Kreipe by special operations officers, including Patrick Leigh Fermor, in 1944. But The Villa Ariadne is far more than just their story. Uniting ancient myths and history with first-hand observation and tales she is told, Dilys Powell leaves us a complex portrait of the island as a whole – a place she knew and loved for forty years.
The Villa Ariadne by Dilys Powell
ISBN: 978-1-78060-035-2
Format: 224pp demi pb
Place: Crete, Greece
Thirty-three years ago, John Hatt set up as a publisher creating ELAND BOOKS, a company born at south London. John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. You wouldn’t have wanted to put any money on it, but only the Eland list has endured. Nowadays, E-editions enable our books to be read in parts of the world where bookshops do not exist, but otherwise Eland continues, very much as it first started, with between two and eight new titles a year, and run from an attic. It is a classic tale of the Hare and the Tortoise, or should one say the Leopard and the Eland. For one of the defining characteristics of the Eland is that it is no good at high speeds but ‘can trot along at fourteen miles an hour indefinitely.’
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