The Deserts of Hesperides: An Experience of Libya [eBook]

Description

The Deserts of Hesperides is a record of Anthony Thwaite’s life in and reactions to Libya during the two periods he lived there: first as a British army conscript in Tripolitania from June 1950 to July 1951, then as a university teacher in Cyrenaica from September 1965 to July 1967.

Looking at previous books about Libya: the journals of nineteenth-century and later desert travellers, war memoirs, archaeological monographs, economic and sociological surveys, accounts such as Gwyn Williams’s Green Mountain and Agnes Newton Keith’s Children of Allah — many of these give attractive and interesting glimpses but all are in some way narrow and partial. Thwaite’s book gives some sense of the feel of this huge and still little-known country, so close to Europe and yet so remote. It is an experience, a personal one, and does not set out to be authoritative and definitive.