In Culture
Biskra is the setting of key sections of André Gide's 1902 novel The Immoralist, and he visited the town in 1895 (for a fortnight from 31 January) with Lord Alfred Douglas, following a meeting with Oscar Wilde in Blida and Algiers.
Algiers was a favourite winter holiday destination of the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. He composed his Suite algérienne in 1880, and died there in 1921.
The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók collected traditional music in Biskra in 1913.
Diana Mayo, protagonist of Edith Maude Hull's popular 1919 novel "The Sheik" starts her journey into the desert from Biskra.
Read more about this topic: Biskra
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.”
—Henry David David (1817–1862)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)