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.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)