Michael Haag – författare

A luminous portrait of the now-vanished cosmopolitan city and those who inhabited it during the first half of the 20th century  This book is a literary, social, and political portrait of Alexandria at a high point of its history. Drawing on diaries, letters, and interviews, Michael Haag recovers the lost life of the city, its cosmopolitan inhabitants, and its literary characters.Located on the coast of Africa yet rich in historical associations with Western civilization, Alexandria was home to an exotic variety of people whose cosmopolitan families had long been rooted in the commerce and the culture of the entire Mediterranean world.Alexandria famously excited the imaginations of writers, and Haag folds intimate accounts of E. M. Forster, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell into the story of its inhabitants. He recounts the city’s experience of the two world wars and explores the communities that gave Alexandria its unique flavor: the Greek, the Italian, and the Jewish. The book deftly harnesses the sexual and emotional charge of cosmopolitan life in this extraordinary city, and highlights the social and political changes over the decades that finally led to Nasser’s Egypt.

A full-color guide to the monuments and landscape of Upper Egypt, now fully revised and updated by leading Egyptologist Aidan Didson Luxor stands on the site of ancient Thebes, Egypt’s opulent New Kingdom capital. It encompasses the spectacular temples of Luxor and Karnak on the east bank of the Nile, and on the west bank the vast necropolis, which includes the Colossi of Memnon, the famed Ramesseum, Queen Hatshepsut’s magnificent funerary temple, and the Valley of the Kings, riddled with royal tombs, among them the fabled resting place of Tutankhamun. The splendor and profusion of pharaonic monuments at Luxor justifies its reputation as the greatest outdoor museum in the world. Reaching beyond Luxor, this book also covers all the major sites of Upper Egypt, including Abydos, Dendera, Esna, Edfu, and Kom Ombo. Special attention is given to Aswan, one of the most beautiful places in Egypt, with its nearby island temple of Isis at Philae. The climax of this informed and richly illustrated book comes with the remarkable temples at Abu Simbel, with their colossal figures of Rameses II and his lovely wife Nefertari cut from the living rock.This edition, now fully revised and updated by leading Egyptologist Aidan Dodson, and presented in a brand new design and easily portable format, is the perfect companion for visitors to Upper Egypt's famed sites and monuments.

The Durrell family are immortalised in Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals and its ITV adaptation, The Durrells. But what of the real life Durrells? Why did they go to Corfu in the first place - and what happened to them after they left?The real story of the Durrells is as surprising and fascinating as anything in Gerry's books, and Michael Haag, with his first hand knowledge of the family, is the ideal narrator, drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished autobiographical fragments. The Durrells of Corfu describes the family's upbringing in India and the crisis that brought them to England and then Greece. It recalls the genuine characters they encountered on Corfu - Theodore the biologist, the taxi driver Spiro Halikiopoulos and the prisoner Kosti - as well as the visit of American writer Henry Miller. And Haag has unearthed the story of how the Durrells left Corfu, including Margo's and Larry's last-minute escapes before the War. An extended epilogue looks at the emergence of Larry as a world famous novelist, and Gerry as a naturalist and champion of endangered species, as well as the lives of the rest of the family, their friends and other animals. The book is illustrated with family photos from the Gerald Durrell Archive, many of them reproduced here for the first time.

'Highly readable and elegant' Spectator'Wonderfully done' GuardianLawrence Durrell was unquestionably one of the most distinctive, original and compelling literary figures of his age. From his childhood in India and Burma to his bohemian youth in London and Paris, from his madcap scheme to move his family to Corfu to the formative war years spent in Alexandria - this masterful and richly detailed biography is essential reading to understand the man and the writer.In Larry, Michael Haag, the world's foremost expert on the Durrells, brought together his unrivalled knowledge and first-hand meetings with the Durrell family and associates to offer the definitive account of the young Lawrence and the real-life settings and stories that inspired his acknowledged masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet.

'Highly readable and elegant' Spectator'Wonderfully done' GuardianLawrence Durrell was unquestionably one of the most distinctive, original and compelling literary figures of his age. From his childhood in India and Burma to his bohemian youth in London and Paris, from his madcap scheme to move his family to Corfu to the formative war years spent in Alexandria - this masterful and richly detailed biography is essential reading to understand the man and the writer.In Larry, Michael Haag, the world's foremost expert on the Durrells, brought together his unrivalled knowledge and first-hand meetings with the Durrell family and associates to offer the definitive account of the young Lawrence and the real-life settings and stories that inspired his acknowledged masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet.

An order of warrior monks founded to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem, the Templars were among the wealthiest and most powerful bodies in the medieval world. Yet two centuries later, they were arrested, accused of blasphemy, heresy and orgies, and their leaders were burnt at the stake.Part guide, part history, this book investigates the Templar legends and legacy - from the mysteries of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, via nineteenth century development of the Freemasons, through to Templar appearances in Dan Brown and Indiana Jones.This book explains the whole context of Templar history, including the recent evidence discovered by the Vatican that the Templars were not guilty of heresy. It also features a guide to Templar castles and sites.

In 1187, nearly a century after the victorious First Crusade, Saladin captured Jerusalem. The Templars, headquartered on the Temple Mount, were driven from the city along with the Frankish population.The fall of Jerusalem was a turning point, the start of a narrative of desperate struggle and relentless loss. In little more than a century Acre would be destroyed, the Franks driven from Outremer, and the Templars themselves, reviled and disgraced, would face their final immolation.Michael Haag's new book explores the rise and fall of the Templars against the backdrop of the Crusader ideal and their settlement venture in Outremer. Haag argues that the Crusader States were a rare period when the population of Palestine had something approaching local rule, representing local interests - and the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin was a disaster. He contends that the Templars, as defenders of the Crusader States, were made scapegoats for a Europe whose newfound nationalism caused it to withdraw support for the Crusader venture. Throughout, he charts the Templars' rise and fall in gripping narrative, with their beliefs and actions set in the context of their time.

Mary Magdalene is a larger figure than any text, larger than the Bible or the Church; she has taken on a life of her own. She has been portrayed as a penitent whore, a wealthy woman, Christ's wife, an adulteress, a symbol of the frailty of women and an object of veneration. And, to this day, she remains a potent and mysterious figure.In the manner of a quest, this book follows Mary Magdalene through the centuries, explores how she has been reinterpreted for every age, and examines what she herself reveals about woman and man and the divine. It seeks the real Mary Magdalene in the New Testament and in the Gnostic gospels where she is extolled as the chief disciple of Christ. It investigates how and why the Church recast her as a fallen woman, it traces her story through the Renaissance when she became a goddess of beauty and love, and it looks at Mary Magdalene as the feminist icon she has become today.

Using vintage photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, many of them from private family albums, this book brings to life the world of that vanished Alexandria, a vibrant, stylish, and cosmopolitan city, the largest port in the Mediterranean, that was the prosperous gateway between Egypt and the world. Seen here in the setting of their homes and gardens, and on the city’s streets and beaches, the faces of those forgotten Alexandrians come to life: the Greeks, Italians, Jews, and all those others from around the Mediterranean whose energy and expertise helped modernize and develop Egypt, and who planted their family roots in the city. This was the luxuriant and evocative city celebrated by Constantine Cavafy, E.M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell, and they too are included in these pages along with photographs of scenes and people that were familiar to them. Vintage Alexandria traces the development and growth of the city, follows its story through the dramatic events of two world wars, and above all provides a background to the city’s place in twentieth-century cultural history, through the eyes of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan citizens themselves.Those citizens and others who passed through the city and appear in these pages included Antony Benaki (the Greek cotton trader whose collection formed the basis of the famous Benaki Museum in Athens), Robert Koch (who isolated the cholera virus and developed a vaccine in an Alexandria laboratory), the Greek children’s writer Penelope Delta, Claude Vincendon (the third wife of Lawrence Durrell), King Victor Emanuel III of Italy, Eve Cohen (the second wife of Lawrence Durrell, and the model for “Justine”), Safinaz Zulfikar (later married to King Farouk as Queen Farida), Rudolph Hess (Hitler’s deputy, who attended school in Alexandria), Jean de Menasce (the “best translator” of T.S. Eliot), Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine, the Egyptian and international film star Omar Sharif, King Hussein of Jordan, Rhona Haszard (the post-impressionist painter), Ahmed Hassanein Pasha (the Egyptian explorer and diplomat), and Noel Coward (the English writer and wit, who sang at the Fleet Club in Alexandria and was mobbed by sailors).

Founded by Alexander the Great over 2,300 years ago, Alexandria has belonged both to the Mediterranean and to Egypt, a luxuriant out-planting of Europe on the coast of Africa, but also a city of the East - the fabled cosmopolitan town that fascinated travelers, writers, and poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where French and Arabic, Italian and Greek were spoken in the cafes and on the streets. In the pages of An Alexandrian Anthology, we follow the delight of travelers discovering the strangeness of the city and its variety and pleasures. Most of all they are haunted by the city's resplendent past - the famous Library, the temple built by Cleopatra for Antony, the great Pharos lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, of which only traces remain - we follow our travelers here too as they voyage through an immense ghost city of the imagination.