Later Years
In 1956 the Suez Crisis ensured the unpopularity of the British in Egypt. The government advised Creswell to leave the country. On learning that his library could not be exported, Creswell resolved to stay. The American University in Cairo offered to house the books on his behalf, and Creswell accepted, albeit with some exceedingly strict strings attached: the students, for example, were not allowed to touch the books.
In June 1973, his health failing, Creswell returned to England. He died on 8 April 1974. He never married.
Creswell bequeathed his library of 3,000-plus volumes to the American University in Cairo, along with his collection of some 11,000 photographic prints. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford received the photographic negatives.
Read more about this topic: K. A. C. Creswell
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“But—if you cannot give us ease—
Last of the race of them who grieve
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent—the best are silent now.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)