Imagine a man in late middle age, fastidiously dressed, his long face ‘creased and dry’, his ‘chameleon-like’ eyes watching behind round glasses. Picture him walking the streets of old Alexandria, stopping to look in shop windows, appraising a handsome clerk or a young man fingering silk handkerchiefs. Follow him home to the cluttered apartment kept deliberately dim, the walls crowded with paintings, the furniture costly but faded and worn. The only bare room holds tables stacked with typeset poems, which he clips together in batches or has bound into booklets to hand out to friends. He makes meticulous lists: of clothes, games he enjoys, pots and pans, regrets, his mother’s jewellery. He holds on to bills, tickets, receipts, menus and recipes (‘cutlets must be beaten’). 

Of all modern Greek poets, Constantine Cavafy is the one most deeply immersed in the stream of world literature, absorbing influences from Robert Browning to Baudelaire and Poe and shaping the sensibilities of later poets like W H Auden, James Merrill and Robert Hass. As a gay icon avant la lettre, he’s touched visual artists too, among them David Hockney and Duane Michals. Since Leonard Woolf published the first book-length English translation of his work at the Hogarth Press in 1951, there have been at least seven more. But only one (now rather dated) biography has been published in English – by Robert Liddell, in 1974. ‘Outside his poetry,’ fellow poet George Seferis wrote, ‘Cavafy does not exist.’

Yet despite his obsession with paper and his careful self-invention, Cavafy – ‘Constantine’ in this book – was very much flesh and blood. Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis, both old Cavafy hands, have trawled monographs, memoirs, letters and the Cavafy Archive to bring him to life, not just in middle