Hoyle was the British Consul in Rhodes during the two years following the war, and became a close friend of Lawrence Durrell.  He is eccentric, ornery, particular, and funny, possibly unintentionally. 

He also had a heart problem which obliged him to stop and rest repeatedly as he walked, and he turned this handicap to his advantage by deploying those pauses as observation opportunities.  In turn, this spilled over into making his accompanying friends see things they would otherwise have blasted past in their hale-and-hearty haste. 

But since he must pause and rest after every little exertion, he had developed an eye for the minutiae of life which all of us lacked.  Forced to stand for ten seconds until his heart slowed down, Hoyle would notice a particular flower growing by the road, an inscription hidden in some doorway which had escaped us, a slight architectural deviation from accepted style. Life for him was delightful in its anomalies, and no walk was possible with Hoyle without a thousand such observations. 

Source: Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), pp. 32-33

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