Many histories deep

the long version

The Second World War stranded a colony of British writers in Egypt, where they lived on the borderland of an alien culture and a distant British homeland. This study concentrates on four important poets - Keith Douglas, Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, and Terence Tiller - the journal with which they were associated, Personal Landscape, and the milieu of wartime Cairo. On the periphery of this group were, among others, Olivia Manning and G. S. Fraser, and the Greek exiles George Seferis and Elie Papadimitriou. Cairo's "unreality" - the war in the Western Desert, cultural otherness and the varied definitions of exile, the layers of a native and an imperial history, the currents of political propaganda, literary rivalries played out far from the metropolitan center - formed the background to the growth of these four distinct poetic voices, as well as the establishment of a magazine that promoted a modernist aesthetic and a canon that embraced contemporary Greek letters.