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Africa between the two world wars - the people, the landscape, the rom ance and the harsh realities. 19990908

About the Author

Elspeth Huxley was born in 1906, the daughter of Major Josceline Grant of Njoro, Kenya, where she spent most of her childhood. She was educated at the European School in Nairobi and at Reading University where she took a diploma in agriculture, and at Cornell University, USA. In 1929 she joined the Empire Marketing Board as a press officer. She married Gervas Huxley in 1931 and travelled widely with him in America, Africa and elsewhere. She was on the BBC General Advisory Council from 1952 to 1959, when she joined the Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa. She wrote novels, detective fiction, biography and travel titles, and her books include The Mottled Lizard (1962), The Challenge of Africa (1971), Livingstone and His African Journeys (1974), Florence Nightingale (1975), Scott of the Antartic (1977), Nellie: Letters from Africa (1980), Whipsnade: Captive Breeding for Survival (1981), The Prince Buys the Manor (1982), Last Days in Eden and Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya (1985). She dies in 1997.

Reviews

"What a marvellous writer...and what a Kenya it was." - "Financial Times"

"What a marvellous writer...and what a Kenya it was." - "Financial Times"

Sparked by the popularity of the screen version of Dinesen's Out of Africa, current interest in Kenya may extend to the reminiscences of Huxley, author of The Flame Trees of Thika and other books on East Africa. These recollections of people and places in colonial Kenya, between the start of war in 1933, when Huxley returned from England to write a biography of Lord Delamere, take in her acquaintance with Beryl Markham and with the flashily dressed Johnston (later Jomo) Kenyattawho, ``in his loud checked trousers and a belted jacket, carried a walking stick with an amber-coloured stone at its tip'' and sat next to her at the London School of Economicsand culminate in the later experiences of her mother Nellie Grant and other characters familiar to viewers of the television series based on Huxley's earlier books. Photos. (March)