Esprit de Corps by Lawrence Durrell

Office List and looked up the Prague Mission. It was Wormwood. It gave me food for deep thought.
    â€œBut time passed, and for nearly ten years I heard no more of Wormwood. Then came that report of wolves eating the Italian Ambassador on the Trieste-Zagreb road in mid-winter. You remember the case? The victim was in a car this time. I do not have to tell you who was driving. Wormwood.
    â€œThen once again a long period of time passed without any news of him. But yesterday …” Antrobus’ voice trembled at this point in the narrative and he drew heavily on his cigar.
    â€œYesterday, I had a long letter from Bunty Scott-Peverel who is Head of Chancery in Moscow. There is a passage in it which I will read to you. Here it is.…
    â€œâ€˜We have just got a new Cultural Sec., rather an odd sort of fellow, a writer I believe. Huge fronded beard, pebble specs, and glum as all highbrows are. He has taken a dumka about twenty miles outside Moscow where he intends to entertain in some style. Usually these hunting lodges are only open in the summer. But he intends to travel by droshky and is busy getting one built big enough, he says, to accommodate the whole Dip. Corps, which he will invite to his housewarming. It is rather an original idea, and we are all looking forward to it very much and waiting impatiently for this giant among droshkies to be finished.’
    â€œYou will understand,” said Antrobus, “the thrill of horror with which I read this letter. I have written at length to Bunty, setting out my fears. I hope I shall be in time to avert what might easily become the first wholesale pogrom in the history of diplomacy. I hope he heeds my words. But I am worried, I confess. I scan the papers uneasily every morning. Is that the Telegraph, by any chance, protruding from the pocket of your mackintosh?”

A Biography of Lawrence Durrell
    Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion, Life called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”
    Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.
    Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. He also read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s provocative third novel, The Black Book (1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note, The Black Book was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.
    In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in