Bøger af Lesley Blanch

When East meet West: in this satirical romance, Lesley Blanch recreates the British India of the 1850's where representatives of Victoria's England preside uneasily over the glittering remnants of the Moghul Empire. She pillories well-bred, seemingly charming individuals who behave exceedingly badly, and exposes their vices, in the piercing vein of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. The governing class is shown to be decadent and depraved.The Rao divided women into two categories: those with bodies and those with jewels . . . Prim and proper Lady Florence and her down-to-earth maid, Rosie, first encounter a Maharajah's heir, the Rao Jagnabad, warrior and slayer of nine tigers, when he visits England on a diplomatic mission. Fierce and handsome in gold-embroidered brocades and magnificent jewels, his powerful masculinity is overwhelming and unforgettable. Fate decrees that, some years later, the two women are marooned in a crumbling palace on a remote, jungly island during the Indian Mutiny. They find themselves in the sole custody of the Rao along with two dozen other Englishwomen. A razor-sharp satire on class and Empire, Lesley Blanch's only novel is outrageous and written with high-spirited panache.JOHN BARKHAM, NEW YORK WORLD - "A delicious tale of low behaviour in high places; with particular attention to the activities of an irresistible and gifted East Indian Prince who takes his own form of revenge against the entire English Empire by inducting a bevy of highborn English females into the fine points of Oriental eroticism, proving that Debrett's Peerage is no match at all for the Karma Sutra."TIME - "Wildly funny."REBECCA WEST - "This book is exquisite, and a new story."OBSERVER - "A mocking confrontation of the attitudes of Clarissa and Fanny Hill set against an exotically sensuous Indian background."DAILY MAIL - "Cynical, sensual, amusing."ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lesley Blanch was a distinguished writer, artist, drama critic, and features editor of British Vogue during World War Two. In 1946 she sailed from England to travel the world with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. By the time they reached Hollywood in the 1950s they were literary celebrities. Their marriage of eighteen years ended when Gary left her for the young actress, Jean Seberg. Blanch headed East to travel across Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, Samarkand, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sahara. Born in 1904, she died aged 103, having gone from being a household name to a mysterious and neglected living legend. The author of twelve books, including Journey into the Mind's Eye, Pierre Loti, The Sabres of Paradise, and Round the World in Eighty Dishes, her memoirs - On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life - are published by Virago and La Table Ronde in France. A follow up volume of her writings, Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places, is published by Quartet Books.

The Sabres of Paradise was first published in 1960, a hundred years after the story it recounts had ended. The Soviet Union was at the height of its power and the Caucasus had been coerced into submissive conformity by the brutalities of Stalin. Today, the narrative is a lot more relevant - post-Vietnam, post-Afghanistan, post-Soviet Union and post-September 11. A dramatist by training, Lesley's Blanch's bold work of narrative non fiction - the definitive biography of Imam Shamyl - builds the story scene by scene of two worlds brought into sudden juxtaposition. It is the product of six years of diligent and scholarly research done in Russia and the Caucasus, including tracing his descendants in Turkey and Egypt. During the Caucasian Wars of Independence of 1834-1859, the warring mountain tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under the charismatic leadership of the Muslim chieftain known as the 'Lion of Daghestan'. For years, Shamyl defied his enemy, the Tsar, who had taken his eldest son as a hostage to St Petersburg. Shamyl captured in turn two Georgian princesses (from the Tzarina's entourage), a French governess, and the children, and kept them in his harem until they could be exchanged for his son. Also a historical narrative, there are beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus - a region of supreme natural beauty and mighty mountain ranges - and the campaigns in which Lermontov and Tolstoy participated. BRIAN ALDISS ― "A book as thick with flavour as roast wild boar, tusks and all. One of the most nutritious books I have ever read." PHILIP MARSDEN ― "Like Tolstoy's, her sense of history is ultimately convincing not because of any sweeping theses, but because of its particularities, the quirks of individuals and their personal narratives, their deluded ambitions, their vanities and passions." HAMISH BOWLES in Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years ― "Jacqueline Kennedy and Khrushchev maintained a spirited badinage through dinner. Mrs Kennedy had recently read The Sabres of Paradise, Lesley Blanch's dashing history of the Muslim tribes' resistance to Russian expansionism in the Caucasus, and attempted to engage the Soviet premier in conversation on the subject. He responded with the comparative numbers of teachers per capita in the Soviet and Czarist Ukraine. She cut him off with the playful riposte, "Oh, Mr Chairman, don't bore me with statistics." NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ― "I can imagine no better introduction to modern Russia." LE MONDE ― "A magnificent historical drama; a marvellous, impassioned biography of Imam Shamyl." AUTHOR BIO Lesley Blanch was a distinguished writer, artist, drama critic, and features editor of British Vogue during World War Two. In 1946 she sailed from England to travel the world with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. By the time they reached Hollywood in the 1950s they were literary celebrities. Their marriage of eighteen years ended when Gary left her for the young actress, Jean Seberg. Blanch headed East to travel across Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, Samarkand, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sahara. Born in 1904, she died aged 103, having gone from being a household name to a mysterious and neglected living legend. The author of twelve books, including Journey into the Mind's Eye, Pierre Loti, The Sabres of Paradise, and Round the World in Eighty Dishes, her memoirs - On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life - are published by Virago and La Table Ronde in France. A follow up volume of writings Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places is published by Quartet Books.

ANDREW ROBERTS: "A superb evocation of the glorious highs and scandalous lows of Regency England" Lesley Blanch's novella-length introduction to the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, the reigning courtesan of Regency London, was first published in 1955 in New York, where she was then living with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. The Wilder Shores of Love, for which Blanch is chiefly remembered, had been published to acclaim the previous year. Harriette Wilson lived among and was an integral part of a wealthy society where privilege, arrogance and leisure flourished. The greatest courtesan of her age, her patrons included many of the distinguished men of her day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. Her weapons of allure were beauty, style and wit. She held court in a box at the opera and competed with her courtesan sisters for status and prestige. The motive for writing the Memoirs, published in 1825, was blackmail, or "a desperate effort to live by my wits," as Wilson put it. She was in her thirties, her looks were fading away as were her admirers, and the annuity she had been promised by the Duke of Beaufort in exchange for leaving alone his heir, the Marquis of Worcester, had been cut off. Wilson offered to edit out of her Memoirs any lovers who paid 200 pounds, thereby holding the British aristocracy to ransom. Certain men who bought her silence were excluded, while others who paid highly were hugely flattered. Those who were brave enough to stand up to her were ridiculed and shamed - most famously the Duke of Wellington: "Publish and be damned!" he cried. She did and she was. Regency England Undressed: Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age also offers intimately detailed portraits of eccentrics, individualists and the demi-monde. Blanch's Biographical Notes in the Appendix read like a raffish Who's Who of Regency England, and Europe too. She brings the distant past to life so it reads like a novel; precise in its curious detail and bold in its historical panache. NEW YORKER: "An enriching introductory biographical essay . . . a valuable corrective to some of the recent attempts to present English Regency society as all elegance, common sense and rationality about sex" 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." LESLEY BLANCH "Today, in America, the courtesan may be said to have been replaced by the psychoanalyst. In place of the alcove there is the analyst's office. But basically the functions of both courtesan and analyst have the same principle. Both offer escape, relaxation and individual attention; both are expensive. And the couch is still there."

A charming selection of writings by a twentieth century luminary. This selection of Lesley Blanch's early journalism, essays and travelling tales forms a brilliant sequel to On the Wilder Shores of Love.

Most famous for The Wilder Shores of Love, her book about four women travellers, Lesley Blanch was a scholarly romantic and a bold writer. Her lifelong passion was for Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East. At heart a nomad, she spent the greater part of her life travelling the remote areas her books record so vividly.Edited by her goddaughter Georgia de Chamberet, who was working with her in her centenary year, this book collects together the story of Blanch's marriage, previously published only in French; a selection of her journalism which brings to life the artistic melting pot that was London between the wars; and a selection of her most evocative travel pieces.Illustrated with photos alongside a selection of line drawings by Lesley Blanch

The classic story of four nineteenth-century women who, for different reasons, gravitated to the wildness of the Middle East and North Africa.

Lesley Blanch was four when the mysterious Traveller first blew into her nursery, swathed in Siberian furs and full of the fairytales of Russia. She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her love-lorn and in the grips of a passionate obsession. The search to recapture the love of her life, and the Russia he had planted within her, takes her to Siberia and beyond, journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye. Part travel book, part love story, Lesley Blanch's Journey into the Mind's Eye is pure intoxication.