Hypatia taught maths and philosophy in Roman Egypt and died a horrific death in the cause of good education. Emily Wilson wonders at modern male writers who still think that “being a sexy bluestocking, martyred (even more sexily) for her pagan brains” constitutes a reason for giving her the attention that has come her way. Hypatia was a teacher, not a pioneer in problem-solving. But beauty and being killed by a mob of Christians has kept her alive from 415 to the present day.

Also to the benefit of her fame was her home town, Alexandria, notorious place of stories, romance and deceit. The poet and critic Peter Porter takes us to the second city of the Roman Empire through a new edition of The Alexandria Quartet, the novel sequence by Lawrence Durrell in which “there is no agreed story about anyone; report and whispers rule . . . and John Keats the disreputable journalist is always on hand when any public nastiness is in question”. There are air-raids and the continuous presence of war amid “ferocious fancy dress balls”. Karl Orend shows some of the literary roads that Durrell took to Alexandria – and finds in two neglected early novels some important clues to the ornate labyrinths of his multi-faceted later work.

The route of Penelope Fitzgerald’s rise to fame has long puzzled her admirers. She emerged in the 1970s as a “jam-making grandmother who took to novel writing in her sixties and mysteriously wiped the floor with writers half her age”. Ruth Scurr has been reading the early signs of artistry in her letters, or those of them that survived the sinkings of her houseboat on the River Thames.

Clive James reviews Artists in Exile, Joseph Horowitz’s account of how refugees from European wars found work in Hollywood and Broadway and transformed the stages and screens of America. Bartók wrote some of his best music in exile, was a huge artistic success, but died broke. Leopold Stokowski shook hands with Mickey Mouse.

Peter Stothard

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