Pleasures and Landscapes

'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 'The Naples boat was on time. Lightly one stepped ashore, and, after a brief, slow ascent, emerged into Piazza still warm under a late afternoon sun.' In these eight evocative and transcendent 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 tantalizing our taste buds with a tour of the vineyards of Bordeaux. Packed with extraordinary excitement, 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 20th Century. '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 '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 . . .' -- Times

Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Charlottenburg, Germany, the daughter of a German father and an English mother. She grew up in Italy, France and England. The account of her travels in Mexico A Visit to Don Otavio was her first published book in 1953, and she followed it with three novels, A Legacy (1956), A Favourite of the Gods (1963) and A Compass Error (1968). Her semi-autobiographical novel, Jigsaw, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. Her memoir, Quicksands, was published in 2005. Sybille Bedford died in 2006.