Lesley Blanch: Inner Landscapes, Wilder Shores

by Anne Boston (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $12.24

  Lesley Blanch, writer, artist and adventuress, called herself a romantic traveller; her appetite for the exotic colours all her books. The first, The Wilder Shores of Love, became a worldwide bestseller. Emotions, she insisted, can be transposed to places or countries and in this she was her own best example. Her guiding passion for Russia began in childhood; later she found the 'eternal Slav' in Romain Gary, Franco-Slav diplomat and writer, and with him embarked on a series of postings from Bulgaria to Los Angeles. After their divorce she transferred her obsession to Turkey, Persia and the Islamic East where she travelled widely, before eventually settling on the Cote d'Azur. Lesley Blanch loved mystery; vivid yet elusive, she hid as much as she revealed and created a legend about her early past. In this first biography, Anne Boston draws on publishers' archives, unpublished journals and conversations with those who knew her, to piece together the portrait of an escapist for whom 'character plus opportunity equals fortune'.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $4.19

  The entertaining and practical pieces which make up Better Against a Wall are selected from the best of Ursula Buchan's journalism from the past fifteen years and demonstrate her highly individual take on gardening and modern gardeners. Politics, practicalities and personalities of the gardening world all find a place in this collection, alongside flowers, garden design, ecological friends and foes. She shivers at the thought of grass snakes, warms to the soft perfection of Shirley Poppies, hunts for plants in Nepal, fails to master machinery, pulls a fast one with climbers and somehow manages to give seaweed a good press.