David Melville Wingrove (MA BFI Cert) from Open Studies at the University of Edinburgh gave a talk on 'Elegies in Exile - Cavafy, Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet'. As moving as he was exhilarating, David's readings were captivating as were his insights into the extra-ordinary world of Durrell's and Cavafy's Alexandria.
A scholar and writer based in Edinburgh, David Melville Wingrove wrote his undergraduate thesis at Harvard University on "Durrell and the Myth of the City in The Alexandria Quartet". His life since then has included language-teaching in Spain, touring theatre in Ireland and journalism in Romania. He now teaches both Literature and Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, including a course on The Alexandria Quartet.
The Hellenic-Egyptian city of Alexandria inspired two great literary monuments in the last century - the lyric verse of the Greek poet C P Cavafy, and the four-novel sequence The Alexandria Quartet by the British author Lawrence Durrell. The poetry of Cavafy was a direct inspiration for the prose of Durrell. Images, themes, places and even characters recur from one work to another. The two authors explore the nature of love (both romantic and erotic) and also the notion of exile, of what it means to be a European in a world that is not your own.
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David McClay, graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh and Liverpool, Senior Curator of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland, gave a talk on 'A publisher's Hellenic engagement: the John Murray Archiveand Greece'.
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'A publisher's Hellenic engagement: the John Murray Archive and Greece': John Murray was one of Britain's leading and longest lasting independent publishers. Over two centuries they published many works related to Greece, from the poetry of Lord Byron, histories of George Grote to tourist Handbooks. The remarkable John Murray Archives give a fascinating insight into this leading Hellenic publisher.
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Born in Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, Dr Robin Barber read Classics at St. Andrews University. After taking the Oxford Diploma in Classical Archaeology with distinction, he was Research Assistant at the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University, from 1969-71. School Student of the British School at Athens and a Greek State Scholar in 1971-2, Dr Barber was Assistant Director of the BSA from 1972-6. He returned to the UK and taught Classical Archaeology at Edinburgh from 1977 to 1998 becoming Head of the Department of Classical Archaeology. He is the author of The Cyclades in the Bronze Age (1987; Greek translation 1995); many other articles on Greek prehistoric and classical archaeology, also on the De Chirico family in Greece and Greek influences on the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico; the Blue Guide to Greece (which he edited from 1985-2000). As well as the Blue Guides to Athens and Rhodes and the Dodecanese; he has also published a Guide to rural Attika (2001). He is at present directing a project to (re)publish finds from the 19th century British School excavations at Phylakopi on the island of Melos.
From the travels of James Theodore Bent in the Cyclades in the 1880s, and the activities of archaeologists such as Humfry Payne (whose links with Greece were recorded by Dilys Powell) to the studies of John Campbell and other social anthropologists up to the centenary of the British School at Athens in 1986, British scholars of many different disciplines have worked in Greece. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, the history of their personal reactions to the country reflects social and economic changes in both Greece and Britain, and provokes observations on such diverse topics as academic fashion and the nature of 'the Greek experience'.