LORNA SAGE, OBSERVER: “Her great gift to her readers has all along been her romantic restlessness and sheer dissatisfaction. It’s this quality that makes her writing addictive – what she calls in a nice phrase from the new book, ‘the habit of faraway places’”
THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE
WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD: “Love, wanderlust, faraway places – all that Romance implies – make up this make up this delicious book”
NEW YORKER: “Four seething but most enjoyable studies in headlong nonconformity”
DAILY TELEGRAPH : “Lesley Blanch has a mischievous chuckle, a girlish voice, precise enunciation and claims that The Wilder Shores of Love is popular because it sounds pornographic . . . . She loves the Arab world as much as her subjects did . . . Blanch may be romantic but is never naïve”
THE SABRES OF PARADISE, Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus
THE GUARDIAN: “Crammed with truly fabulous stories of fighting and love and violent death . . . this profound and exhilarating book turns the struggle of the people of the Caucasus to remain independent of Russia into a universal saga . . . it is no wonder Shamyl had such a powerful influence on Tolstoy and Pushkin”
LE MONDE: “A magnificent historical drama; a marvellous, impassioned biography of Imam Shamyl”
PIERRE LOTI, Portrait of an Escapist
PETER CAREY, SUNDAY TIMES “Loti, an ex-crony explained to Mrs Blanch, loved both men and women passionately, and if there had been a third sex would have loved that too . . . This is his first biography in English, and he has been lucky to find a chronicler as romantic, as addictively readable, and almost as smitten with the East as himself”
THE GAME OF HEARTS, Harriette Wilson and her Memoirs
Harriette Wilson’s actual diaries are in the public domain. Lesley Blanch’s extensive introduction is now published under the title Regency England Undressed: Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age.
ANDREW ROBERTS: “A superb evocation of the glorious highs and scandalous lows of Regency England”
PAVILIONS OF THE HEART, The Four Walls of Love
MAUREEN CLEAVE, DAILY TELEGRAPH: “A scholarly romantic in a school of her own, the depth of Lesley Blanch’s research is such that other writers plunder her books shamelessly”
FARAH, Shahbanou of Iran – Queen of Persia
Lesley Blanch always chose what she wanted to write: this is the only one of her books to have been written on the basis of a commission.
The biography of Farah Diba – from an ancient Azerbaijani family of landowning nobility – who married His Imperial Majesty The Shahanshah of Iran in 1959, it vividly evokes the Shahbanou’s personal family life and public works, set against the historical background of Iran. She, her husband, and their four children went into exile following the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
ABEBOOKS.COM: “Lesley Blanch gives a close-up portrait of this young and beautiful woman – a romantic personality who was often called ‘The Working Empress’. She journeyed tirelessly around her country furthering the many cultural, scientific and humanitarian projects in which she is deeply involved”
Read Lesley Blanch writing about The Magic of Iran – part 1 (1965)
Read Lesley Blanch writing about The Magic of Iran – part 2 (1965)
Biography. Collins, 1978 160pp illus. (OP)