Passenger to Teheran (Tauris Parke Paperback) [Paperback]

It's awfully good...The whole book is full of nooks and crannies, the very intimate things one says in print.'- Virginia Woolf ' Passenger to Teheranis utterly different from a returned traveller's lecture... It gives pleasure because it describes pleasure, illuminated by what Winifred Holtby called 'the lucid tranquility of her lovely prose'. She could describe a scene, a person, an emotion with enviable spontaneity, plunging her hands into the treasury of the English language as greedily as into the jewel-chests of the Shah. It is a glittering book.' - Nigel Nicolson, in his introduction to Passenger to Teheran '...we are told what Miss Sackville-West saw in Persia, but always with such an artistic touch, such an individual style, that it is the traveller who mostly holds our attention.' - Daily Telegraph 'She pursues the good, the true and the beautiful with relentless tenacity and a charming style.' - New York Times 'A glittering jewel of a book.' - Publishers Weekly 'Brilliant style...a lyrical period piece which contains passages of unquestionable beauty.' - Library Journal

In 1926 Vita Sackville-West travelled to Iran to visit her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was serving as a diplomat in Teheran. Her route was deliberately slow-paced - she stopped in Egypt, where she sailed up the Nile to Luxor; and India, where she visited New Delhi and Agra before sailing across the Persian Gulf to Iraq and on through bandit-infested mountains to Teheran. She returned to England in an equally circuitous manner and despite travelling under dangerous circumstances, through communist Russia and Poland in the midst of revolution, her humour and sense of adventure never failed. "Passenger to Teheran" is a classic work, revealing the lesser-known side of one of the twentieth century's most luminous authors.

Vita Sackville-West, the celebrated writer and Bloomsbury member, was a prolific poet and author. Her most famous works include 'The Edwardians', 'All Passion Spent' and the classic poem 'The Land' which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. With her husband she created the magnificent and hugely influential gardens at their home, Sissinghurst Castle. In 1946 she was made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. She died in 1962.