This unfinished biography evokes Corfu and Alexandria – but leaves disturbing questions unansweredSpirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. “Spirit of Place”, though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell’s literary output: Prospero’s Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations.It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag’s best book was Alex...