Peter Levi
1 873429 35 5
£12.99
234pp 16pp plates map introduction
bibliography notes index
pbk with flaps 140 x 215mm portrait
Published in association with Ostara Publishing
This is a beautiful book, a poetic evocation and worthy of a place on the shelf beside Kinglake's Eothen and Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana.
John Morris in the Sunday Times
Rich in anecdote and general speculation.
Simon Raven in the Observer
When I first read this book years ago it had all the glamour of a revelation. Levi reminds me that travel writing need have no boundaries. He moves seamlessly between its different elements, writing about Persian history, an elderly shepherd in the passes of Nuristan, the ruined tomb of Shah Rukh's mother and a visit to the Kabul zoo as if they are all aspects of the same thing, which of course they are. No one writes about landscape with such exquisite restraint. A curiosity of The Light Garden is that it has one of the first appearances of Bruce Chatwin in a travel book: he was Levi's companion in Afghanistan. But this is a far greater work than anything Chatwin produced. Former Jesuit, novelist, biographer, archaeologist and classical scholar, Levi brings to the book the ensibilities of all these disciplines. But above all he is a poet, and The Light Garden has the lyricism and the metaphorical resonanceof poetry. I still turn to it for inspiration.
Stanley Stewart, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, in the Daily Telegraph
From time immemorial Afghanistan has been a mountainous crossroads. Through it have come merchants with indigo and Chinese silk, Alexander the Great, nomads from the steppes, colonies of Buddhist monks, great Moghul conquerors and the ill-fated armies of the British Raj.
In 1970 Peter Levi, classical scholar, archaeologist and later Professor of Poetry at Oxford, set off with Bruce Chatwin to seek the clue which each migration left. It is this quest that gives his fascinating book its theme. How far east did Alexander really establish himself? Who built the great upland castle that exists on no map? Could the sculptors of Athens really have influenced the early Buddhist artists?
In drawing back the curtain on Afghanistan, Levi reveals not a rocky wilderness ranged over by plunderers, but, in the words above Babur's tomb, 'a highway for archangels'.
First published in 1973, this account of Afghanistan is an acknowledged classic of travel writing. It is now reissued with fresh photographs from the Chatwin archives and a new introduction in which Peter Levi looks back on a lost Afghanistan, 'an island in time, a ruined paradise', and on his friendship with the young Chatwin.
Peter Chad Tigar Levi was born in 1931, and educated at Beaumont and Oxford. He trained as a Jesuit and was ordained in 1964. He pursued an academic career as a classicist at Oxford, before leaving the priesthood and marrying in 1977. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1984. His published work includes many volumes of poetry, translations of the Greek classics, editions of Johnson, Boswell and Kipling, biographies, travel books and an autobiography, The Flutes of Autumn. He died in February 2000.
