"The island lies like a strange, misshapen dagger in the blue Ionian Sea, midway along the Greek and Albanian coastlines. In the past, it has fallen into the hands of a dozen different nations, from all of which it has absorbed what it found good and rejected the rest, thus keeping its individuality. Unlike so many parts of Greece, it is green and lush, for when it was part of the Venetian empire they used it as their oil store, planting thousands of olive trees, so that now the bulk of the island is shaded by these carunculated giants with their wigs of silvery-green leaves. Between them run the admonishing fingers of black-green cypress, many planted in groves as dowries. All this creates a mystical landscape, bathed in sharp brittle sunlight, orchestrated by the knife-grinder song of the cicadas, framed in the blue, still sea. Of all the wonderful and fascinating parts of the planet I have been privileged to visit, Corfu is the nearest approach to home for me, since it was here, nurtured in sunlight, that my fascination for the living world around me came to fruition."
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Naturalists from EnglandChildren's authorsNon-fiction authors from EnglandBiologists from EnglandZoologists from England
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Gerald Durrell
Gerald "Gerry" Malcolm Durrell (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995) was a naturalist, zookeeper, author, and television presenter, most famous for founding what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust on the Channel Island of Jersey and for writing a number of books based on his animal-collecting and conservation expeditions. He was the brother of Lawrence Durrell.
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