Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
It was here, yesterday, that I came upon an unexpected sight--an army of workmen engaged in burrowing furiously into the bowels of Mother Earth. They told me that this tunnel would presently become one of the arteries of that vast system, the Apulian Aqueduct. The discovery accorded with my Roman mood, for the conception and execution alike of this grandiose project are worthy of the Romans. Three provinces where, in years of drought, wine is cheaper than water, are being irrigated--in the teeth of great difficulties of engineering and finance. Among other things, there are 213 kilometres of subterranean tunnellings to be built; eleven thousand workmen are employed; the cost is estimated at 125 million francs. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
After an hour's contemplation of the beauties of nature I descended once more through that ilex grove to Serrone. And now it began to grow decidedly warm. The wide depression between this village and Olevano used to be timbered and is still known as la selva or la foresta. Vines now occupy the whole ground. If they had only left a few trees by the wayside! Walking along, I encountered a sportsman who said he was on the look-out for a hare. Always that hare! They might as well lie in wait for the Great Auk. Not long ago, an old visionary informed me that he had killed a hare beside the Ponte Milvio at Rome. Hares at Ponte Milvio! ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of (George) Norman Douglas, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2352 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
There are two kinds of Englishmen--those who stay at home and those who go abroad. Douglas was one of the latter.

He was born in 1868, mid-Victorian, and received a classical education. To a lad of spirit and imagination, England was no place to stay.

So he shipped to Italy and there remained, steeped in the land and tradition, 100 years ahead of his time. In books such as SIREN LAND, he wrote of the timeless things that come to us from antiquity. His books are erudite and humane, rather like a seminar with a favorite professor.

But not dry! Douglas was a confirmed hedonist, and he milked the sensual pleasures for all they were worth. By 1952, the year in which he died he had his fill. Not suprisingly, he killed himself. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Capri and Sorrento: an elegy to their past and present
Siren Land is a strange book according to modern standards, it is actually not a modern book at all. It belongs to those essayistic travelogues that characterised the period from the end of the Nineteenth to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. It was written in 1911, on a journey performed by the Author in 1908. Norman Douglas (1868-1952), was a very peculiar writer, reared between Germany and England, devoid of a formal college education, ex diplomat, expatriate due to various sexual scandals (pederasty). He has left us three novels, and five travel books, of which Siren Land is the first.
The Siren Land encloses the Sorrentine Peninsula and Capri, which together form the Southern arm of the Bay of Naples. This country was a favorite resort of Englishmen traveling abroad and it represented for most Northners the paradise of the Mediterranean South. This magnificent region was once isentified as the home of the Sirens, mythological creatures half human and half birds (Homer), that the Middle Ages turned into women fish. Starting from this ancient Siren myth, Douglas narrates the topographical and archeological features of the Bay of Naples. First he climbs on the highest hights and "grasps" the geography and the sprit of the palce, and then with his beautiful prose he stars heading back and forth between history and the present. However, as in other books of his (Old Calabria, for example) narrative and description are interrupted by the frequent insertion of moral essays, on ethics derivable from ruins, absence of sexual liberty in the European North and other such issues. Chapters deal with local winds (the famous Scirocco of Capri, a Southeastern wing that drives people crazy) and their folklore, the character of Tiberio (the Roman Emperor that decided to spend his last ten years of life in Capri and that here is called Timberio and has been unjustly treated by Roman historians), local ghosts (from dead maidens, to priests and hermits),and that of Sister Seraphina (Capri's patron saint that is plasmated on Saint Teresa d'Avila), caves (the Blue Grotto for first, but also many others) and their narrative, leisure, local wine (that at Douglas's time wasn't very good - differently to today, go there today and ask for Biancolella d'Ischia - note from Sabina).
I am sure many readers will find this book difficult to read, because of the pre-modern sensibility of the Author. His humoristic Nietzschean naughtiness and the puritan determination of his atheism and hedonism, together with the eccentric attitude of the typical British abroad may seem fastidious to modern Europeans today, but if the approach to the read is orientated toward and antiquarian fascination with language and humanism intentended as the satisfaction of curiosity of one's whereabouts and nothing else, there is no book more pleasant expecially if you are resting on a balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples on a summer afternoon.
I must add a personal note. I bought this book during my honeymoon in Capri and have always treasured it in this edition but I hope it will be republished possibly with notes. To Italians Norman Douglas was a precious friend, he was elected honorary citizen of Capri after WWII and here he successively committed suicide many years later after having become one of the Island's monuments. Naturally time has taken his toll on this eccentric Englishman, but I believe he still inhabits the Island. ... Read more

Amazon.com
A delightfully inventive ragout of fiction and historical fact,Roger Williams's first novel revolves around a pair of 20th-centuryicons. There is Norman Douglas, the erudite charmer, gourmet, scoffer,quaffer, and high-spirited pederast, best known as the author of South Wind. And thereis Elizabeth David, who transformed Britain's humdrum eating habits in1950 with the publication of Mediterranean Food. A homage toboth of these glorious hedonists, Lunch with Elizabeth Davidcomes in two parts, divided roughly along his-and-hers lines.

The first section details the unsentimental education--classical,culinary, sexual--of one Eric Wolton, a working-class Londonercelebrating his 13th birthday in Naples in 1911. This fictional figureis promptly "ravished by Norman Douglas the length and breadth ofCalabria." Man and boy take their pleasures lightly indeed as theyvoyage across Italy's boot (which Douglas went on to celebrate in Old Calabria). And inlater years, Eric, now resigned to a dull policeman's existence,recalls that summer as "the best time in his life." In 1951, however,he is abruptly summoned to the island of Capri, where Douglas and hisfashionable entourage--including Harold Acton, Graham Greene, andGracie Fields--are joining Elizabeth David for a farewell lunch.

In the novel's second part, Williams veers more decisively in thedirection of fiction. The scenario goes like this: In the late winterof 1946, Cherry Ingram's mother had waited upon Elizabeth David in ahotel in Ross-on-Wye. (In the novel she is alone; in reality, she wasthere with a lover, and famously described the food as "produced with akind of bleak triumph which amounted almost to a hatred of humanity andhumanity's needs.") Cut to the late 1980s, which find Cherry deliveringa whitefish to a "Mrs. David"--bibulous, overbearing, and suspicious ofthe finny creature's provenance. This chance encounter leads Cherryinto her own past, which turns out to dovetail not only with David'sbut with that of Norman Douglas and his young paramour.

Williams's novel wonderfully evokes the glories of the Mediterranean,not to mention its multiple pleasures. It is perhaps less successful atsplicing Eric and Cherry into the historical canvas: the drama of theirlives inevitably pales beside Douglas's high-cholesterol existence, orDavid's. That said, the good parts are truly delicious and well worthsampling. --Ruthie PetrieBook Description
They meet by chance in 1940 - the debonair gastronome Norman Douglas and a stylish, slightly haughty, well-bred Elizabeth Gwynne - at a street market in the South of France. He lectures her on the marvels of tarragon, and in that seminal moment in Antibes begins the epicurean tutelage of the woman who became Elizabeth David, England's premier writer on continental cuisine, and who reeducated the palate of the English-speaking world with the robust flavors of Mediterranean living.

In that moment, too, Elizabeth David enters the enchanted circle of Norman Douglas's friends, among them Graham Greene, Gracie Fields, Nancy Cunard, and, less famously but more significantly, Eric Walton, the man who has known him as Uncle Norman since 1910, when a boyish scrape during a fireworks display at Crystal Palace introduced a working-class kid from North London to the intriguing, worldly gentleman who would take him to the sun-drenched shores of southern Italy. >From idyllic Mediterranean days in Calabria before World War I through the hardships and tensions of Vichy France to the drudgery of England's recovery from World War II and finally the affluence of high-living contemporary London, this evocative novel artfully charts a journey that ends with a perfect - and long-haunting - lunch on the island of Capri. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Haunting.....
I had read a few of her cook books, and decided to read a biography of Elizabeth David's life (WRITING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE by Artemis Cooper), before I read LUNCH WITH ELIZABETH DAVID. I'm glad I did. Roger Williams probably provides the reader with enough information to make the necessary connections to David's life, but I know my prior reading enhanced my experience. I think I would have profited a bit more if I had read some of Norman Douglas' books before reading LUNCH-at the least "Old Calabria." Fortunately, I had read other authors who'd written about Italy in the "old days" before WWII.

Williams' writing is reminiscent of Nabokov, Durrell-and Elizabeth David. I think his book is very literary in tone and substance, and as is often the case with "classical" works, some of the content is distasteful, although this interpretation is subjective on my part, and not perhaps how Williams sees it. Norman Douglas more frequently than not went about with young boys in tow, and was described by more than one court as a pedophile. I find pedophilia disgusting, but I'm glad I did not follow my first impulse which was to throw the book in the trash bin because it contains more than allusions to this topic.

The main focus of the book is not Douglas, as the book jacket suggests, but the effect he had on other lives. The protagonist in the first section of the book, which takes place mostly before WWI and includes Douglas as a character, is a 12-year old boy from the East End of London named Eric. The main character in the second part of the book, which takes place in 1990s England, is a woman named Cherry whose mother served as maid for Elizabeth David for a short while during WWII. Cherry marries John, Eric's grandson, and a London fish shop owner. Cherry sometimes helps John deliver fish, and eventually develops her own catering business. Food associations lead Cherry to discover Elizabeth David and Norman Douglas.Her discoveries have a profound effect on her life.

LUNCH WITH ELIZABETH DAVID is a hauting book about the long-lasting effects of other people's lives.

More about two authors
Roger Williams is mining the degrees of separation between two comparatively unknown British authors, Norman Douglas and Elizabeth David. Williams' strategy is to mix a roman a clef and a dash of mystery-book plotting. Douglas, best known for the cult favorite "South Wind," and David, for cook books/good-eating sensibility before that was a genre unto itself, met before WWII and had a brief friendship. Williams supposes a charming connection between the two that evolves into a fictional contemporary link. This is especially compelling for fans of either of these two writers. ... Read more