Gayer-Anderson
Regular price
€31.99
A fascinating biography of the renowned Orientalist and collector
A01=Louise Foxcroft
Author_Louise Foxcroft
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Adventurers & Explorers
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DNBP
Category=NHG
Category=NL-BG
Category=NL-BM
Category=NL-FJ
Category=NL-HB
Category=NL-WT
Category=WT
Category=WTL
COP=Egypt
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_travel
Format=BB
Foxcroft
Gayer-Anderson
History and Biography
HMM=230
IMPN=The American University in Cairo Press
ISBN13=9789774168000
Language_English
Louise
PA=Available
PD=20161103
POP=Cairo
Price=€20 to €50
PS=Active
PUB=The American University in Cairo Press
Subject=Adventure
Subject=Biography: General
Subject=History
Subject=Memoirs
Subject=Travel & Holiday
The Life and Afterlife of the Irish Pasha
TRAVEL Essays & Travelogues
TRAVEL Middle East Egypt
WG=547
WMM=150
Product details
- ISBN 9789774168000
- Weight: 547g
- Dimensions: 150 x 230mm
- Publication Date: 03 Nov 2016
- Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
- Publication City/Country: Cairo, EG
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Based on the personal journals of Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson (1881-1945), Egyptologist, poet, surgeon, soldier, psychic, and noted collector, this candid and charming historical biography tells of Gayer-Anderson's strange and eclectic life in the final days of the British empire. As a child, he crossed an unforgiving America with his entrepreneurial and eccentric Irish parents. As a man, he immersed himself in the Arab way of life as colonials seldom did; he saw ghosts and witches, sailed the Nile, wrestled Turks and crocodiles, fought at Gallipoli, smoked opium, performed surgery in the desert, gathered and cared for artefacts and boys in his Cairene home, survived an assassination attempt and, in the name of science and Henry Wellcome, in flowery glades he boiled the flesh from the skulls of Nuba warriors. His personal journals are filled with frank accounts of his exploits and of the illustrious and colorful people who wandered by: Lawrence of Arabia, Gordon, Kitchener, Conan-Doyle, Eric Gill, and Stephen Spender, among others. Drugs, race, class, family, sex, and selfhood are vividly mixed in this tale of two wars, colonial life, medicine, anthropology, and psychic phenomena. The stiff-upper-lipped ritual of a very British upbringing vied with his Romantic and consuming love of beauty, vividly embodied in the Gayer-Anderson Museum in Cairo, which to this day houses his vast collection of carpets, furniture, glassware, and other curios.
Louise Foxcroft is a prize-winning historian and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She has published six books, and has appeared on television and radio. www.louisefoxcroft.com
