Despite his lack of conventional higher education, Creswell’s wide reading in the travellers of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the architectural historians of the nineteenth century, from Ruskin to Strzygowski and Diez, was a formidable preparation for the study of the architecture of Islam. This reflected both the strengths and weaknesses of the conventional classical education he received at Westminster. To that, for example, we can probably attribute the care and acuteness of his critical appraisals of the Arab geographers which he read in translation and which are an essential element in his painstaking reconstructions of the original form of the great buildings of early Islam. It also doubtless gave him the confidence to tackle modern works in French, Italian, and German, though as his weird translation of Herzfeld’s glockenformige Kapitellen at Samarra as” clock-formed,” which is still to be found in the new edition of his Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, shows he would have done better to make more frequent use of a German dictionary. But his enthusiasms were limited. Though by the time I knew him his deafness precluded all enjoyment of music he never spoke of it and may never have had time for it. And the well-known, and decidedly touching, story in the aftermath of the Suez fiasco of his recitation of the Tristia, written by Ovid on the occasion of his eternal banishment from Rome to the Black Sea, while waiting in his flat in a poor part of Cairo for the expected decree of ex-pulsion to arrive, speaks therefore less for his literary culture (he would have learned it by heart at school) than for a taste for the dramatic, to which anyway many other anecdotes bear witness.
