Pleasures and Landscapes

In these eight evocative and unpredictable essays, Sybille Bedford chronicles her adventures through Europe over a thirty-year period. With her elegant prose and razor-sharp insight, Bedford takes us on a propulsive journey - dropping us into the passenger seat as she drives to meet Martha Gellhorn in Capri, taking us across the wind-swept piazzas of Venice in winter, and tantalising our taste buds with a tour of the vineyards of Bordeaux. Bedford shows us the world through her eyes - the eyes of a seasoned traveller - in all its beauty and wonder. Pleasures and Landscapes is a satisfyingly sensuous literary expedition told by one of the greatest travel writers of the twentieth century. ‘Bedford’s ability to recreate landscape is matched only by her appetite for mouth-watering descriptions of exotic food . . . She cannot write a dull page.’ - Financial Times ‘Bedford writes of the lure of the sensual life, the picnics, lobster salad, hock and seltzer and going to the opera, in Italy, in summer . . .’ - The Times ‘When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Sybille Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.’ - Bruce Chatwin