GUARDIAN

This power of islands to incite fantasy is the subject of Peter Conrad’s new book. Conrad was born on Tasmania, and although he fled his native island at a young age, before washing up in landlocked Oxford, he continued to demonstrate what Lawrence Durrell called “islomania”: “a rare but by no means unknown affliction of the spirit”, whose sufferers “find islands somehow irresistible”. His book sets out to chart islomania as it figures in the work of poets, artists, “runaways, beachcombers, and children who refuse to grow up”. His material is the phantasmagoria of island-dreamers, from Homer to Tom Hanks by way of Donne and Dumas. Read more here