La biographie originale et personnelle de Pierre Loti par Lesley Blanch, écrivaine-voyageuse et la première épouse de Romain Gary
Julien Viaud, passé à la postérité sous le nom de Pierre Loti, est mort le 10 juin 1923 à 73 ans. On lui fit des funérailles nationales. En 2023, nous fêtons le centième anniversaire de sa disparition. À cette occasion, son extravagante maison de Rochefort avec sa mosquée damascène, fermée depuis 2012, rouvre ses portes.
Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places is the sequel to the memoirs of Lesley Blanch, published posthumously by Virago, On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life. Available for the first time as a paperback and an e-book.
The collection opens with an insightful introduction about her two great loves: émigré theatre director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, and twice-Goncourt-winning novelist, Romain Gary. Her impressions of people and places have an enduring intensity and she writes of them as vividly as she does her own experiences.
We see rising stars Vivien Leigh and Peter Ustinov in 1940s London; and war reporter Germaine Kanova, the ‘French Lee Miller’; the last great Ruritanian Queen Marie of Rumania in her Balkan setting; and Pierre Loti in Turkey, or rather Loti-land.
Greetings to our readers! It is exciting to announce that the Lesley Blanch estate is now represented by Peters, Fraser & Dunlop. PFD represents a large number of literary estates of authors of must-read classics . . . including those of Sacheverell Sitwell, Rebecca West, Eric Ambler and Simenon who were friends of Lesley Blanch’s in life. If you still have not read her memoirs On The Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life, published posthumously by Virago and La Table Ronde, then you’re missing out!
INDEPENDENT: “Sumptuous and captivating” DAILY TELEGRAPH: “On The Wilder Shores of Love is a truly remarkable book” STACEY, blogger at IT TAKES A WOMAN: “I rarely read non-fiction books, but when I do, I tend to enjoy reading about women who kick arse, and in Far to Go & Many to Love, Lesley Blanch confirms her membership of this club with her superb, descriptive writing . . . Whether writing about people or places, Lesley Blanch’s writing is arresting and has real life to it – her piece about Vivien Leigh is a particular favourite of mine and, as I said, the whole collection is put together with such love and respect, that it is a fantastic introduction to the work of a remarkable woman”