Haag’s biography supplies some of the history which the Durrell memoirs lack — including an extraordinary vignette of Lawrence living in Cyprus in the 1950s. He and his second wife Eva would sit at opposite ends of a table with their typewriters — Lawrence writing The Alexandria Quartet in which Eva appears as Justine, while Cypriot bombs shook the very windows around them. When Gerald looked into setting up his pioneering zoo on the island, he quickly realised that the political situation — of a terrorist campaign to achieve union with Greece — made this impossible. Haag notes that “Larry himself was nearly killed by a terrorist’s bullet and an incendiary bomb was placed in his garage”. But he does not mention the dictatorship, which was in power when the BBC took Gerald and Theodore to Corfu to film the 1967 documentary The Garden of the Gods. In this, the son of the Greek ambassador to London, then aged ten, ran about recreating the role of Gerald of the mid-Thirties. At the same time, both of  Theodore’s grandsons were under house arrest in Athens.