At the age of 43 year old Elizabeth Barrett Browning gave birth to her first and only child, her son Pen, in the bedroom of the Casa Guidi in Florence. The most celebrated woman poet of her time had found new reserves of stamina since her departure from the life of a quasi-invalid in the stuffy bedroom at Wimpole St. And she had, at the age of 40, found love. Husband Robert whose devotion seems never to have wavered called her “A soul of fire in a shell of pearl.”
A visitor who rents the Brownings’ Italian home from the Landmark Trust can sleep in that bedroom (where Elizabeth was to die 12 years later) though not in the original bed. The furnishings were all sold at auction at Sothebys in 1912. Only the efforts of the Browning Society of New York saved the apartment itself from being converted to offices in the 1970s.
When I was spending a winter in Florence in the early 90s, I attended a rather forlorn cocktail party at the Casa Guidi just opposite the Palazzo Pitti. The rooms were almost empty except for portraits of the poets. The American hosts from the Browning Institute served us sherry and spoke in that valiant American way of their plans to retrieve or replace all the furniture so that the place would look the way it had in the Browning’s day. I didn’t think they had much hope of success. The restoration plan did prove difficult but help came in 1993 when ownership was transferred to Eton College. The Landmark Trust was brought into act as agents and in July 1995, the restored Casa Guidi was reopened for rent to up to six people.
Anybody who has looked for a flat in London will find comfort in reading of how Robert Browning traipsed around Florence “returning in despair,” in Elizabeth’s words, when he was looking for a cool summer place for them to rent. He finally found the Casa Guidi and for that first summer they replaced a Russian prince and lived among his luxurious furnishings. When they returned the following year they bought their own furnishings and drapes. Although a lot of the original furniture has been lost, one of their favourite pieces an exuberant rococo mirror with very plump cherubs clutching candlesticks, still hangs on the drawing room wall. Elizabeth’s mother-of- pearl tea caddy is displayed on a table. The portrait of her father, who never forgave her for marrying, still hangs in the bedroom.
In our driven workaholic age, I found it refreshing to read that in their early years at Casa Guidi, these two great poets didn’t bother writing much poetry. Robert sculpted and painted. He confessed to a friend that he could “with an unutterably easy heart, never write another line.” He went out a lot in the evenings and was very popular with women although he seems to have remained devoted to his wife. Elizabeth wrote to a friend that “being too happy doesn’t agree with literary activity.” More reclusive than her husband she was content to lie around on one of her eight sofas reading “wicked” French novels. Most of all and hard to believe in our cynical times, they seemed happy just to be together, walking on the narrow terrace in the evenings, going to Doney’s café for an ice cream or sitting on the Ponte Vecchio. When they did venture out, for example to hear “Signor Verdi’s very passionate and dramatic new opera “Il Trovatore” at the Pergola theatre, the low cost of living in Florence meant that they could do it in style and rent a box and order champagne. When they stayed home they ordered in from the trattoria across the road.
A lot of what the Brownings did in Florence is not that different from what a contemporary visitor would do today. Doney’s café only disappeared a few years ago. Nowadays the Pergola theatre tends to concentrate on prose with the Teatro Communale providing the operas. A visit to the Casa Guidi is a good opportunity to discover the “Oltrarno” district of Florence. Traditionally the poorest district of Florence, it is earthier, less fashionable, more of a neighborhood than the other side of the river. Conscious of the traffic problems in the cramped, narrow streets, the city has introduced electrical “Bussini ecologici “- little ecological buses. Line D will take you round the Oltrarno district with frequencies every eight minutes. On the second Sunday of each month a flea market is held just a block from Casa Guidi on Piazza Santo Spirito.
Elizabeth Browning is buried in the Protestant Cemetery, situated these days in the middle of the Viale, the ring road that circles central Florence. I tried to cross and pay her a return visit but the traffic was too frenetic. I retreated gratefully to the peace of my 21st century hotel.
For further information:http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk
HG Wells, The War of the Worlds and Woking
Stephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise in Woking? It was never going to happen. Woking is a very ordinary town, an hour's train ride south of London. It lacks the drama that Americans have the ability to confer on their dullest destinations. So Tom Cruise flees those spindly monster tripods as he travels from Athens, New York to his inlaws' house in Boston.
But walk out of Woking station, turn right and head along the diagonal street towards the precinct. And there he is at the end of the street. Wells' weird and wonderful Martian on his tripod watching over the Saturday shoppers in the precinct. Wells himself lived in Woking and would wander the nearby heathlands with his brother Frank discussing the great questions of life. They, like us, were living at the birth of a technological revolution: telegrams, electricity and fast news were new arrivals on their scene. "Suppose" Frank once asked "some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly" and thus the 1898 novel was born.
The Martian cylinders land in familiar suburban locations: Horsell Common, Addlestone Golf Links, Pyrford. The narrator's journey takes him not through Cruise and Spielberg's contemporary New York and New Jersey but along the hedgerows of southern England to a devastated London. The book is a fast, exciting read, worth revisiting and making the Spielberg film look clunky and sentimental in comparison.
But walk out of Woking station, turn right and head along the diagonal street towards the precinct. And there he is at the end of the street. Wells' weird and wonderful Martian on his tripod watching over the Saturday shoppers in the precinct. Wells himself lived in Woking and would wander the nearby heathlands with his brother Frank discussing the great questions of life. They, like us, were living at the birth of a technological revolution: telegrams, electricity and fast news were new arrivals on their scene. "Suppose" Frank once asked "some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly" and thus the 1898 novel was born.
The Martian cylinders land in familiar suburban locations: Horsell Common, Addlestone Golf Links, Pyrford. The narrator's journey takes him not through Cruise and Spielberg's contemporary New York and New Jersey but along the hedgerows of southern England to a devastated London. The book is a fast, exciting read, worth revisiting and making the Spielberg film look clunky and sentimental in comparison.
Byron and Venice
The end, in Missolonghi, Greece was sad - Byron was bled to death by doctors who knew no better. The beginning, born in Aberdeen and attended Cambridge, was often uproarious but the man lived most of his thirty six years in exile. Some of his finest moments were spent in Venice.
The poet would swim home from evening engagements along the Grand Canal. His valet would accompany him in a gondola, holding his clothes. As Byron scholars will tell you, his complex about his club foot had contributed to his skill as a swimmer. In the water he gained grace - even in the waters of the Grand Canal.
He first came to Venice in 1816 at the age of 28. Byron described Venice as, next to the East, "the greenest island of my imagination". His first sojourn was fairly discreet by Byronic standards. He taught himself Armenian, attended performances at La Fenice opera - 'the finest I have ever seen.' By the time of his second visit in 1818, he was a celebrity- a superstar poet.
His friend, Hoppner, the British Consul describes British tourists in Venice, "eyeing him as they would a statue in a museum." Byron had at one point boasted of having a different woman on 200 consecutive evenings during his Venice stay which probably accounts for a lot of the fascination. But the man found time to work. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto IV with its famous opening line:
"I stood in Venice on the "Bridge of Sighs",
A Palace and prison on each hand,"
was composed during this time. Ever the exile, Byron did not stand in Venice for long. By 1819 he was gone.
The poet would swim home from evening engagements along the Grand Canal. His valet would accompany him in a gondola, holding his clothes. As Byron scholars will tell you, his complex about his club foot had contributed to his skill as a swimmer. In the water he gained grace - even in the waters of the Grand Canal.
He first came to Venice in 1816 at the age of 28. Byron described Venice as, next to the East, "the greenest island of my imagination". His first sojourn was fairly discreet by Byronic standards. He taught himself Armenian, attended performances at La Fenice opera - 'the finest I have ever seen.' By the time of his second visit in 1818, he was a celebrity- a superstar poet.
His friend, Hoppner, the British Consul describes British tourists in Venice, "eyeing him as they would a statue in a museum." Byron had at one point boasted of having a different woman on 200 consecutive evenings during his Venice stay which probably accounts for a lot of the fascination. But the man found time to work. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto IV with its famous opening line:
"I stood in Venice on the "Bridge of Sighs",
A Palace and prison on each hand,"
was composed during this time. Ever the exile, Byron did not stand in Venice for long. By 1819 he was gone.
Virginia Woolf, Mills and Boon and London
I hated the film "The Hours". Julianne Moore's period housewife was okay but oh Nicole and that putty nose. Perhaps I had a slight over-reaction because this is the one literary location that deals with the place where I grew up. The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has been, variously, home to Mick Jagger, Richard Attenborough, Queen Elizabeth the First (a small part of her palace remains by the Thames) even Alan Bennett's 'Mad' King George had his palace within the borough just down this wide and pastoral stretch of the river at Kew.
Virginia Woolf lived in Richmond for a while and it is here that she and husband, Leonard Woolf, set up the Hogarth Press which would go on to launch the literary careers of Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Clive Bell, C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, John Maynard Keynes. And the Woolf's quite literally "set up" the press - starting with a small handpress that they operated out of their dining room at 34 Paradise Road in Richmond.
But when I taught creative writing, very briefly, in the borough's continuing ed programme, it was a publisher at a 18-24 Paradise Road who seemed to excite my students' imagination: Mills and Boon, (motto - 'pure reading pleasure') the UK equivalent of Harlequin Romance occupies offices just yards from the Woolf's old home. And students would pass through my classes reciting the same old mantra: "well, we wouldn't read one but we've heard that they are easy to write and that the money is good." I never knew what to say to that. I sensed that you probably had to believe in that kind of romance to write that kind of romance. It would have been interesting to hear what Virginia Woolf would have thought of the neighbours.
The Hogarth Press house and the Mills and Boon offices are on either side of a busy T-junction. The Woolf's old home is not open to visitors. You have to head down to Rodmell in East Sussex and visit Monks' House. We'll save that for another post.
Richmond is worth a visit anyway. In one scene in 'The Hours', Kidman is filmed at the top of Richmond Hill with the Thames, winding through meadows and round woodsy islands towards the horizon. It is still one of the loveliest views in London but these days you are more likely to glimpse Mick Jagger out for a stroll.
Virginia Woolf lived in Richmond for a while and it is here that she and husband, Leonard Woolf, set up the Hogarth Press which would go on to launch the literary careers of Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Clive Bell, C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, John Maynard Keynes. And the Woolf's quite literally "set up" the press - starting with a small handpress that they operated out of their dining room at 34 Paradise Road in Richmond.
But when I taught creative writing, very briefly, in the borough's continuing ed programme, it was a publisher at a 18-24 Paradise Road who seemed to excite my students' imagination: Mills and Boon, (motto - 'pure reading pleasure') the UK equivalent of Harlequin Romance occupies offices just yards from the Woolf's old home. And students would pass through my classes reciting the same old mantra: "well, we wouldn't read one but we've heard that they are easy to write and that the money is good." I never knew what to say to that. I sensed that you probably had to believe in that kind of romance to write that kind of romance. It would have been interesting to hear what Virginia Woolf would have thought of the neighbours.
The Hogarth Press house and the Mills and Boon offices are on either side of a busy T-junction. The Woolf's old home is not open to visitors. You have to head down to Rodmell in East Sussex and visit Monks' House. We'll save that for another post.
Richmond is worth a visit anyway. In one scene in 'The Hours', Kidman is filmed at the top of Richmond Hill with the Thames, winding through meadows and round woodsy islands towards the horizon. It is still one of the loveliest views in London but these days you are more likely to glimpse Mick Jagger out for a stroll.
Douglas Coupland's Vancouver
Sailing past Canada House in Trafalgar Square, on the top of a double decker bus, I saw the banner draped across the building - Douglas Coupland. I knew that Coupland was a novelist but had no knowledge of his artistic activities. So I assumed that the Canadians had decided to fly Coupland in from his native Vancouver and just, well, have him hang out inside their splendid old colonial building. I debated going in and hanging out with him but the bus had sailed past, on its way to Piccadilly. And really, Coupland belongs in Vancouver.
Coupland belongs in West Vancouver to be precise. His seminal, "Generation X" may have taken place in the US but Coupland, who confesses these days to caring little for travel, is rooted in that bright, almost Californian, land of upmarket strip malls and luxury mansions on hills with stunning views that lies beyond the Lions Gate bridge - gazing sleepily across at downtown Vancouver.
Coupland's "jPod" had a recent outing as a series on Canadian tv. That story revolves around a group of video game programmers whose last names all begin with 'J'. They work in a 'pod' developing a game called 'BoardX'(and later 'Sprite Quest'). Coupland has been quoted as saying that the company they work for resembles but in no way is Electronic Arts - a video game company located in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.
But my favourite Coupland novel is "Eleanor Rigby". This one is a bit of a departure from his admittedly brilliant observations on our Google run planet. No other writer has understood and described our strange new cyber world better than Coupland. And with such rapidity. The man does not need to stand back and ponder a development. It happens and Coupland has it processed and ready to go.
"Eleanor Rigby" is the story of a very lonely woman,Liz Dunn, living in a dull little condo in, where else, West Van. Her life turns around when her deeply disturbed and terminally ill, illegitimate son who she had given up for adoption, returns to her life. For all his irony and detachment, Coupland has an almost naive sweetness in dealing with his character's emotional lives. Without saying too much, he gives his heroine a happy ending but not before leading his reader through one of the finest studies of modern loneliness that I've come across in a long time.
Stephen King's Maine
The American day begins in Maine –mossy, moosey Maine – that rugged, empty,most northeastern state. Maine is first with the dawn but it is a writer of our darkest nights who is one of Maine’s most famous sons. Stephen King, the world’s bestselling novelist and recent recipient of the National Book Foundation Medalwas born in Portland Maine and has spent most of his adult life in Bangor, Maine.
“King fans come to Bangor from as far away as Moscow,” says Stu Tinker who presides over Betts Books in a small parade of shops on Hammond Street. The bookstore is a virtual King museum; it carries copies of all his works,first editions, foreign language editions, t-shirts and other memorabilia. Tinker even has an address in Beijing on his mailing list. How could someone in Beijing relate to King’s Bangor or those Maine woods? How much of King’s tenebrous world can we even hope to find in Maine? Surely the journey we need to make is inside the man’s teeming brain? Since that is not an option, I rent a car and head for Bangor on a grey autumn day. Bangor looks to this English writer’s eyes, a lot like a northern English industrial town – oppressive dark red brick buildings –a chimney stack or two. For Europeans whose fantasy New England is one of white clapboard villages, the industrial red brick is always a surprise.
King’s birthplace of Portland is, these days, a politely bustling port town of art galleries, coffee shops, fine restaurants and elegant brownstone houses on cobbled streets. But he has chosen to live in Bangor – a bleaker, more northern place a quintessentially America small town whose heart has evidently been ripped out and transplanted to the local strip mall where it now beats weakly if at all.But of course King is bound to be more redbrick than white clapboard, more Bangor than Portland. And Bangor looms over his work.
King’s fictional town of Derry is Bangor,the setting for “It” the 1981 novel that some feel is King’s finest work.Stu Tinker is happy to provide a map that allows King pilgrims to make their way to many Bangor literary locations that feature in “It” and other novels and films. The gateway to “It’s” lair was through a sewer pipe in a swampy woodland by the Kenduskeag stream on the edge of town. Just a few minutes away is the Thomas Hill standpipe, an immense, white fortress-like structure that contained the dead children’s souls in “IT” and, when the evil erupted out of the earth, toppled and flooded Derry. The standpipe is still functioning– there is an enormous cistern inside. At night it takes on an eerie beauty when it is crowned with lights. The canal where “It’s” unfortunate gay victim is thrown to his death still runs just behind City Hall.“Graveyard Shift” was filmed at the waterworks. The narrator’s beloved wife in “Bag of Bones” dies just outside the pharmacy a few blocks up from Betts Books on Hammond. A lot of “Insomnia” is set around that same humble block of shops on Hammond. King often hides his monsters right there in the utilities - in those mundane, ignored places that hold our lives together – and often it seems the connection is water – the canal, the standpipe and, of course, the sewer.
Like so many masters of horror, he knows that the ordinary become extraordinary is the most horrifying of all.But, of course, he also takes us to the cemetery. Pet Sematary was inspired by a mispelt sign on a real pet cemetery out near Orrington where the Kings once lived. The film used Bangor’s lovely Mount Hope cemetery as a location and King himself in a cameo as a preacher..
King’s Bangor home is easy to distinguish even though it is not marked on any of the maps. The neo-gothic structure stands behind a wrought-iron fence on one of the city’s most elegant boulevards where the lumber barons once built their mansions.Spider’s webs are woven into the wrought-iron fence, bat wings adorn the rim – a three-headed griffon rises out of one corner.
King has also used the celebrated Maine coast as a setting – most recently in the tv screenplay “Storm of the Century” where tiny Southwest Harbor became the blizzard-bound and blighted Little Tall Island of the Story. I spend a sunny day in pursuit of King locations at Southwest and neighbouring Bar Harbor. I find instead lovely late summer villages with not a hint of evil. But the woods are all around – those Maine woods so celebrated of Thoreau and transformed into the primeval forest in Pet Sematary. I stop the car on the road and wonder if I should find a trail and walk in.But dusk will fall soon. And anyway King’s universe is elsewhere – in the world of every child who still fears the bogeyman, the child that everyone of us on the planet once was, who knows that the thing that made the twig snap in the woods is real. And is looking for us. And those primeval woods are the same for all of us because they come not from external geography but from some mysterious cellular memory that we all carry whether, in our daily existence, we look upon Red Square, the Forbidden City or Hammond Street in Bangor, Maine.
Further information on Maine at: www.visitmaine.com – toll free: 1 888-95-Maine.
“King fans come to Bangor from as far away as Moscow,” says Stu Tinker who presides over Betts Books in a small parade of shops on Hammond Street. The bookstore is a virtual King museum; it carries copies of all his works,first editions, foreign language editions, t-shirts and other memorabilia. Tinker even has an address in Beijing on his mailing list. How could someone in Beijing relate to King’s Bangor or those Maine woods? How much of King’s tenebrous world can we even hope to find in Maine? Surely the journey we need to make is inside the man’s teeming brain? Since that is not an option, I rent a car and head for Bangor on a grey autumn day. Bangor looks to this English writer’s eyes, a lot like a northern English industrial town – oppressive dark red brick buildings –a chimney stack or two. For Europeans whose fantasy New England is one of white clapboard villages, the industrial red brick is always a surprise.
King’s birthplace of Portland is, these days, a politely bustling port town of art galleries, coffee shops, fine restaurants and elegant brownstone houses on cobbled streets. But he has chosen to live in Bangor – a bleaker, more northern place a quintessentially America small town whose heart has evidently been ripped out and transplanted to the local strip mall where it now beats weakly if at all.But of course King is bound to be more redbrick than white clapboard, more Bangor than Portland. And Bangor looms over his work.
King’s fictional town of Derry is Bangor,the setting for “It” the 1981 novel that some feel is King’s finest work.Stu Tinker is happy to provide a map that allows King pilgrims to make their way to many Bangor literary locations that feature in “It” and other novels and films. The gateway to “It’s” lair was through a sewer pipe in a swampy woodland by the Kenduskeag stream on the edge of town. Just a few minutes away is the Thomas Hill standpipe, an immense, white fortress-like structure that contained the dead children’s souls in “IT” and, when the evil erupted out of the earth, toppled and flooded Derry. The standpipe is still functioning– there is an enormous cistern inside. At night it takes on an eerie beauty when it is crowned with lights. The canal where “It’s” unfortunate gay victim is thrown to his death still runs just behind City Hall.“Graveyard Shift” was filmed at the waterworks. The narrator’s beloved wife in “Bag of Bones” dies just outside the pharmacy a few blocks up from Betts Books on Hammond. A lot of “Insomnia” is set around that same humble block of shops on Hammond. King often hides his monsters right there in the utilities - in those mundane, ignored places that hold our lives together – and often it seems the connection is water – the canal, the standpipe and, of course, the sewer.
Like so many masters of horror, he knows that the ordinary become extraordinary is the most horrifying of all.But, of course, he also takes us to the cemetery. Pet Sematary was inspired by a mispelt sign on a real pet cemetery out near Orrington where the Kings once lived. The film used Bangor’s lovely Mount Hope cemetery as a location and King himself in a cameo as a preacher..
King’s Bangor home is easy to distinguish even though it is not marked on any of the maps. The neo-gothic structure stands behind a wrought-iron fence on one of the city’s most elegant boulevards where the lumber barons once built their mansions.Spider’s webs are woven into the wrought-iron fence, bat wings adorn the rim – a three-headed griffon rises out of one corner.
King has also used the celebrated Maine coast as a setting – most recently in the tv screenplay “Storm of the Century” where tiny Southwest Harbor became the blizzard-bound and blighted Little Tall Island of the Story. I spend a sunny day in pursuit of King locations at Southwest and neighbouring Bar Harbor. I find instead lovely late summer villages with not a hint of evil. But the woods are all around – those Maine woods so celebrated of Thoreau and transformed into the primeval forest in Pet Sematary. I stop the car on the road and wonder if I should find a trail and walk in.But dusk will fall soon. And anyway King’s universe is elsewhere – in the world of every child who still fears the bogeyman, the child that everyone of us on the planet once was, who knows that the thing that made the twig snap in the woods is real. And is looking for us. And those primeval woods are the same for all of us because they come not from external geography but from some mysterious cellular memory that we all carry whether, in our daily existence, we look upon Red Square, the Forbidden City or Hammond Street in Bangor, Maine.
Further information on Maine at: www.visitmaine.com – toll free: 1 888-95-Maine.
DH Lawrence and Taos, New Mexico
When DH Lawrence first saw the Taos Valley in 1922 he said, “Something stood still in my soul and I started to attend.” He described New Mexico in general as “the greatest experience from the outside world that I ever had.
A tubercular DH Lawrence came to Taos on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s invitation in 1922. New Mexico’s dry climate was thought to be beneficial. Mabel, a wealthy American woman who had run literary salons in New York and Italy, knew upon arriving in this small town nestling between the mountains and the mesa, that here she could found her long dreamed of community of artists, writers and thinkers. With her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, an Indian from the Taos Pueblo, she created a three storey house full of light in stark contrast to the squat low adobes of local architecture. In addition to Lawrence, visitors included Georgia O’Keefe, Carl Jung and Willa Cather. Lawrence went on to do some more painting while here and his notorious “pornographic” pictures are now kept in a locked room behind the reception desk at the garish La Fonda hotel on that mournful plaza. They can be viewed on request. I requested and got to see what are probably the least accomplished works on display in the whole town.
His New Mexican stay inspired Lawrence's short story "The Woman who Rode Away." Lawrence himself would not, in the end, ride away from Taos. His ashes are enshrined here at Mabel's ranch a short drive outside town. The novelist who travelled restlessly around the world has returned to Taos forever.
A tubercular DH Lawrence came to Taos on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s invitation in 1922. New Mexico’s dry climate was thought to be beneficial. Mabel, a wealthy American woman who had run literary salons in New York and Italy, knew upon arriving in this small town nestling between the mountains and the mesa, that here she could found her long dreamed of community of artists, writers and thinkers. With her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, an Indian from the Taos Pueblo, she created a three storey house full of light in stark contrast to the squat low adobes of local architecture. In addition to Lawrence, visitors included Georgia O’Keefe, Carl Jung and Willa Cather. Lawrence went on to do some more painting while here and his notorious “pornographic” pictures are now kept in a locked room behind the reception desk at the garish La Fonda hotel on that mournful plaza. They can be viewed on request. I requested and got to see what are probably the least accomplished works on display in the whole town.
His New Mexican stay inspired Lawrence's short story "The Woman who Rode Away." Lawrence himself would not, in the end, ride away from Taos. His ashes are enshrined here at Mabel's ranch a short drive outside town. The novelist who travelled restlessly around the world has returned to Taos forever.
Ian Fleming's Goldeneye and Quantum of Solace
What a strange title for the new James Bond film. "Quantum of Solace" was a short story by Ian Fleming that appeared in "Modern Woman" in 1959. James Bond plays a smaller role in the story. "Quantum of Solace" is a mathematical measurement of love- that calculates the comfort, humanity and fellow feeling required between two people for love to survive. All a long way, away from the exotic setting of the classic Bond stories. But set in the Caribbean so not far from Fleming's opulent home, Goldeneye, in Jamaica.
Ian Fleming spent 20 winters at this clifftop villa at Orcabessa, a small port on Jamaica’s north coast. He wrote 14 of the James Bond books here. Visitors included Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Taylor and Evelyn Waugh. Noel Coward lived nearby at his villa, Firefly in Galina, now a museum. Fleming’s three bedroom home on a bluff overlooking a secluded cove is now part of a larger resort with four other villas, ranging from one to three bedroom units and can be rented individually or as a whole. His writing desk made of Jamaican Blue Mahoe can be seen in the master bedroom. The small cinema on site has a full collection of James Bond videos.
Ian Fleming spent 20 winters at this clifftop villa at Orcabessa, a small port on Jamaica’s north coast. He wrote 14 of the James Bond books here. Visitors included Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Taylor and Evelyn Waugh. Noel Coward lived nearby at his villa, Firefly in Galina, now a museum. Fleming’s three bedroom home on a bluff overlooking a secluded cove is now part of a larger resort with four other villas, ranging from one to three bedroom units and can be rented individually or as a whole. His writing desk made of Jamaican Blue Mahoe can be seen in the master bedroom. The small cinema on site has a full collection of James Bond videos.
Rudyard Kipling in Vermont
“All things considered there are only two kinds of men in the world - those that stay at home and those that do not,” said Kipling. He, of course, did not. He came to live in Vermont near Brattleboro and his American wife, Caroline’s family. Kipling fell in love with this New England landscape and bought eleven acres of land on a hill looking over the Connecticut River Valley. There he supervised the building of Naulakha - the jewel beyond price.Their daughers were born here and in the study, which remains exactly as he knew it, Kipling wrote the stories that were to become The Jungle Book. Wonderful autumn colours around this house and log fires and sleigh rides in winter. Another Landmark Trust property: www.landmarktrust.co.uk
Lawrence Durrell - White House, Kalami, Corfu
“English life is really like an autopsy. It is so, so dreary,” said Lawrence Durrell. Born in India, Durrell had found life in England unendurable when he returned there to attend school at the age of eleven. He later persuaded his family to move to Corfu in 1939 where they rented the White House in Kalami . Durrell felt that Greece reconnected him to India. He wrote descriptions of the house on the bay of Kalami and its views of Albania in his book “Prospero’s Cell”. He wrote descriptions of the house on the bay of Kalami and its views of Albania in his book “Prospero’s Cell”. His writing desk and dining table still form part of the apartment’s furnishings
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