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“... made him rich and famous, dubbed him the Magician – an apt enough nickname. Loti’s style, as Lesley Blanch points out, does not translate well into English, nor has it been well translated. It is deceptively simple, relying on assonance and repetition to lull the reader into a somnolent trance in which the commonest words seem transfigured: ‘Les ...”

“... been shunned by academics. ‘Harriette Wilson’s life was deplorable – but how readable!’ Lesley Blanch exclaims in her introduction to this latest reprint, anxious, like almost everyone else who has written about Wilson, especially the women, to distance herself from her subject. Virginia Woolf, whose essay on Wilson was published in The Moment ...”

“... of Abyssinia (though he conceded that Waugh was a good stylist). He was rude about Freya Stark and Lesley Blanch, and he rowed with Joy Adamson. He described Jan Morris’s Sultan in Oman as ‘chatty rubbish’. He thought that the Marsh Arabs had been misrepresented in Maxwell’s book and that A Ring of Bright Water did not give him enough credit for ...”

“... that the vainglorious Iranian royal family sought and found its biographers and publishers. Lesley Blanch is signed up to write a biography of the Empress. Margaret Laing is invited round to lunch with her publisher, Lord Longford, to straighten out her biography of the Shah. Rather late in the day Lord Weidenfeld suggests that Lord Chalfont take ...”

“... agree, to make her sound less Eastern European and/or less Jewish. His first marriage, to Lesley Blanch, author of The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), whom he met in London in 1944, isn’t mentioned, perhaps because it doesn’t fit with his frequent complaints – or boasts – that his mother’s fierce love spoiled him for other women, or ...”

“... was fading: Settle made Vogue a magazine for the Bright Young Things, who, according to Lesley Blanch, a contributor, were ‘cropped, plucked and pickled in cocktails and nicotine’. Vogue positioned itself as the authority for the new style. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz, Kate goes to a dance in an apple-green frock (made ...”