The city of Alexandria itself is a character in the books

history channel documentary 2016 The city of Alexandria itself is a character in the books and goes about as a background and world pool of memory; however there was nothing old about the city that Durrell knew. He filled in as a press attaché in Cairo and Alexandria amid the Second World War and saw the nineteenth-century Ottoman Alexandria with its European façades and exquisite seafront, however these developments were not exactly a hundred years old.Ancient Alexandria had surely been an incredible city and bragged one of the Wonders of the World - the Lighthouse or Pharos - together with the Great Library. However, this colossal cosmopolis fell into such haggardness that Napoleon's troops discovered just a little angling town on the site in 1798. The archeological rediscoveries of Alexandria of the Ptolemies were not made until the 1990s when the harbor was dug and amplified. Old Alexandria was under the ocean.

Durrell saw a port city that facilitated a substantial ostracize group where French and Italian and Greek and English were talked more than Arabic. The Greek artist Constantine Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis 1863-1933) lived here all his life and his verse is greatly cited in The Alexandria Quartet. The city was an objective of the Egyptian Revolution and most nonnatives left or were ousted in the 1950s.Durrell composed verse and true to life and inventive composition. His portrayal of Northern Cyprus in Bitter Lemons (1957) is a verifiable record and a travelog composed before parcel of the island and the approach of mass tourism; however, once more, cutting edge sensibility may not accord with Durrell's thoughts of neighborhood shading and curious characters.