Villa Ariadne

The Villa Ariadne stands above the Minoan ruins of Knossos in Crete, a memorial to the British archaeologists who built, lived and worked there. Dilys Powell brings to life the autocratic founder Arthur Evans and his successor John Pendlebury, whose heroic leadership of the local defence against German invasion in 1941 made him a legend. The villa was also the site of the daring kidnap of German General Kreipe by special operations officers, including Patrick Leigh Fermor, in 1944. But The Villa Ariadne is far more than just their story. Uniting ancient myths and history with first-hand observation and tales she is told, Dilys Powell leaves us a complex portrait of the island as a whole - a place she knew and loved for forty years.

Autorentext

Dilys Powell had two passions: Greece and the cinema. She was born in 1901 and met her first husband, the archaeologist Humfry Payne, while they were both at Oxford. It was with Humfry that she fell in love with Greece. When he died there, unexpectedly, in 1936, just ten years into their marriage, her love of the country deepened, and she wrote several books set in Greece, illuminated by its bright light and contrasting shadows. Powell's career as a film critic began in 1928, when she joined the Sunday Times and she was still watching five films a week into her nineties. She was a generous reviewer, who admitted "I suppose I began as most young people do, showing off and trying to make jokes, but then it began insensibly to dawn on me that being a critic was not criticising in the cant sense of the word." She was much loved in the film world. She died in 1995.