“I love LB. WHAT a spirit. What courage. What class” – MIRANDA SEYMOUR Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places is the sequel to the memoirs of Lesley Blanch, published posthumously by Virago, On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life. The collection opens with an insightful introduction about her two great loves: émigré theatre director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, and twice-Goncourt-winning novelist, Romain Gary. Her impressions of people and places have an enduring intensity and she writes of them as vividly as she does her own experiences. We see rising stars Vivien Leigh and Peter Ustinov in 1940s London; and war reporter Germaine Kanova, the ‘French Lee Miller’; the last great Ruritanian Queen Marie of Rumania in her Balkan setting; and Pierre Loti in Turkey, or rather Loti-land. She was ahead of her time, 'translating cultures' to readers back home as she covered subjects as various as polygamy, the Orient Express and life in post-war Bulgaria; escaping Christmas in Mexico with her husband when he began to write Promise at Dawn; and journeying from Uzbekistan to Guatemala by way of North Africa and Mexico. Lesley Blanch describes her later travels in North Africa, and her love of Afghanistan which she visited in the 1970s before the Soviet invasion. She was among a handful of strong women who led the way, doing their own thing – Rebecca West and Nancy Mitford among them. The lives and loves of Lesley Blanch and those trailblazing women of her generation who lived purposeful, intense lives, inspired a generation of women – Marianne Faithfull and Shirley Conran; the late Jackie Kennedy and Anaïs Nin among them. Illustrated with photos and unpublished sketches from Blanch’s portfolio from when she worked with Komisarjevsky, a friend and colleague of Sergei Diaghilev’s, founder of the Ballets Russes housed at the The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale. “Lesley Blanch is herself Scheherazade . . . I was fascinated by the charm and with which she tells biographical facts . . . [with] great vitality, superb storytelling . . . My admiration for her was total” – THE DIARY OF ANAÏS NIN (1957)