Gayer-Anderson: The Life and Afterlife of the Irish Pasha [Hardcover] Foxcroft, Louise

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Product Overview

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. Read more