In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor

ISBN-13: 9780719568572 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 416 str.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Opis

In 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, in Ireland. This halcyon visit sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of highly entertaining letters.

Recenzje

'Packed with gossip, creaky jokes and gadding about...all but the most inverted of snobs will enjoy a cheery time in these pages' The Independent, Christopher Hirst

O autorze

In December 1933, at the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) walked across Europe, reaching Constantinople in early 1935. He travelled on into Greece, where in Athens he met Balasha Cantacuzene, with whom he lived - mostly in Rumania - until the outbreak of war. Serving in occupied Crete, he led a successful operation to kidnap a German general, for which he won the DSO and was once described by the BBC as 'a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene'. After the war he began writing, and travelled extensively round Greece with Joan Eyres Monsell whom he later married. Towards the end of his life he wrote the first two books about his early trans-European odyssey, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He planned a third, unfinished at the time of his death in 2011, which has since been edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper and published as The Broken Road. The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire was brought up in Oxfordshire. In 1950 her husband Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, inherited estates in Yorkshire and Ireland, as well as Chatsworth, the family seat in Derbyshire, and Deborah became chatelaine and housekeeper of one of England's greatest and best-loved houses. Following her husband's death in 2004, she moved to a village on the Chatsworth estate. She died in 2014.