The definitive, epic biography of the Muslim chieftain Imam Shamyl, the ‘Lion of Daghestan’, THE SABRES OF PARADISE took six years to complete, with research done in Russia and the Caucasus, including tracing his descendants in Turkey and Egypt. ― THE SABRES OF PARADISE is the story of two worlds (two faiths, two societies, two continents) brought into sudden juxtaposition. During the Caucasian Wars of Independence, the warring mountain tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under the charismatic leadership of Imam Shamyl, strengthened only by the desire for an independent Caucasus and their religious faith. ― For years Imam Shamyl defied his enemy, Tsar Nicholas I, who had taken his eldest son as a hostage to St Petersburg. The Muslim chieftain captured in turn two Georgian princesses (from the Tzarina’s entourage), a French governess, and the children, and kept them in his harem until they could be exchanged for his son. ― A universal saga, it is also a history of late 19th century Imperialist Russian rule. The struggle of the people of the Caucasus to remain independent of Russia had a powerful influence on Tolstoy and Pushkin, and is disturbingly relevant to our world today.― It is set both in the Caucasus, a region of supreme natural beauty and mighty mountain ranges, and in St Petersburg, the most elegant and sophisticated of Russian cities.GUARDIAN: "Crammed with truly fabulous stories of fighting and love and violent death . . . this [is a] profound and exhilarating book."PHILIP MARSDEN: “Like Tolstoy’s, Lesley Blanch's sense of history is ultimately convincing not because of any sweeping theses, but because of its particularities, the quirks of individuals and their personal narratives, their deluded ambitions, their vanities and passions.”HAMISH BOWLES in JACQUELINE KENNEDY: THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS: “Jacqueline Kennedy and Khrushchev maintained a spirited badinage through dinner. Mrs Kennedy had recently read THE SABRES OF PARADISE, Lesley Blanch’s dashing history of the Muslim tribes' resistance to Russian expansionism in the Caucasus, and attempted to engage the Soviet premier in conversation on the subject. He responded with the comparative numbers of teachers per capita in the Soviet and Czarist Ukraine. She cut him off with the playful riposte, “Oh, Mr Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics.” BRIAN ALDISS: "A book as thick with flavour as roast wild boar, tusks and all. One of the most nutritious books I have ever read."

The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus

Biographies & Memoirs

Blanch, Lesley

Community & Culture

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JOHN BARKHAM, NEW YORK WORLD − A delicious tale of low behaviour in high places; with particular attention to the activities of an irresistible and gifted East Indian Prince who takes his own form of revenge against the entire English Empire by inducting a bevy of highborn English females into the fine points of Oriental eroticism, proving that Debrett’s Peerage is no match at all for the Karma Sutra . . . TIME − Wildly funny.The Rao divided women into two categories: those with bodies and those with jewels . . . When East meet West: in this witty satirical romance, Lesley Blanch recreates the British India of the 1850’s, where representatives of Victoria’s England preside uneasily over the glittering remnants of the Moghul Empire. The Nine Tiger Man is a piquant tale of a Maharaja’s heir, a Viscount’s daughter and an uninhibited chambermaid who sampled one another’s environments and were never the same again. The women first encounter the Rao Jagnabad, warrior and slayer of nine tigers, when he visits England on a diplomatic mission. Fierce and handsome in gold-embroidered brocades and magnificent jewels, he meets the prim and proper Hon. Florence at a ball. She is overwhelmed by his powerful masculinity and dreams of him to the exclusion of all else, to the intense irritation of her fiancé. Her maid, Rosie, is also overwhelmed and samples the Rao for herself. Fate decrees that, some years later, the two women are marooned in a crumbling palace on a remote, jungly island during the Indian Mutiny. They find themselves in the sole custody of the Rao along with two dozen other Englishwomen. A razor-sharp satire on class and Empire, the outcome is surprising, even to Rosie. Lesley Blanch’s only novel was written while in Rajasthan: “I had pulled a ligament in my leg and had to stay on an island in Jaipur. You could hear the leopards coughing at dusk in the far hills, and the parakeets flew around turning the sky green. One day I saw what I thought was a log, but it was a crocodile. I had heard the story of a group of English women being put on that island during the Mutiny and not daring to escape because of the crocodiles − they were just stuck there, with no news, and fearing the worst. From that I imagined the whole novel.”DAILY TELEGRAPH − Panache, high spirits, faultless timing and uncontrollable fun.

The Nine Tiger Man: A Satirical Romance

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR – Beautifully done. A marvellous subtle knack of catching atmosphere and landscape, an ear for the spoken word that evokes half Balzac, half Alain Fournier . . . I loved it. Gael Elton Mayo lived in two regions of France which came to mean a great deal to her. In the Franche-Comté, she lived with her husband in the fortress-château of Frontenay which had been a stronghold against the French. She had to learn, quite literally, to live with its ghosts. In this land of vast distances and turbulent rivers – Stendhal country – old ways were still adhered to. The people seemed to be partly shaped by their fierce history. The Franche-Comté, has been French only since the seventeenth century, and suffered numerous brutal attacks and betrayals during its long fight to keep its independence. When Gael Elton Mayo first knew it in the 1960s, there were still several men who preferred to live wild in the woods to more conventional ways. As she describes her experiences, the texture of life, local habits, food, architecture, and the Jurassiens, she simultaneously opens windows on to the region’s past. This is recorded in detail only by local historians, since more general histories of France tend to dismiss it with brevity. She uses the same method when describing a village in the Vaucluse – the inland part of Provence far from the crowded coast – where she bought a farmhouse some ten years after losing the château and separating from her husband. There she and her daughter made friends with a family of smallholders who, it turned out, shared similar views to her husband and his neighbours. They all felt that something of great value was being leached out of their lives by the conditions of modern life, and a gradual assimilation into the outside world. The End of a Dream is a lyrical evocation of a long-forgotten yet echoingly familiar world, and an engrossing portrayal of life in rural France predating the environmental degradation of today. SUNDAY TIMES – I find it hard to pinpoint the unique charm of this halfmemoir, half-travel book. It is about unusual people in the Jura and Provence, by an unusual person. THE SPECTATOR – The visual quality of [Gael Elton Mayo’s] writing conjures up with words a magic picture . . . describing the texture of a Jurassien village in the early 1960s, her memoir reads like Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou . . . This satire on modern mores ends up like a Proustian meditation on time. BOOKS – This book is extremely subtle both in its construction and constant changes of key . . . Gael Elton Mayo speaks of two unique regions of France with her magical voice . . . the fierce independence of the Jura, the moody mountain in Provence, the vivid pictures of people, animals, wines, food, flowers – even the Mistral – made me feel nostalgic about places I had never seen.

The End of a Dream: A Memoir

Arts & Photography

Elton Mayo, Gael

History & Criticism

Dramatic travel writer, French naval officer who wore rouge and liked to disguise himself as a Turk or a Bedu, amateur acrobat, ebullient self-dramatist and romantic: Pierre Loti was a global celebrity before the concept was even thought of. When he died in 1923, he was given a state funeral, the only French writer to have received such an honour other than Victor Hugo. An unorthodox writer, Loti’s most outstanding creation was himself.His Protestant family living in Rochefort on the Atlantic Ocean fell into poverty, but his writing got them out of it. He married, but also had a second Basque family. He loved women and men with intense passion and freedom wherever he went, and immortalized Aziyadé who left her harem at night to see him when he was stationed in Istanbul. As Lesley Blanch said: "It's awfully easy to say of someone who wears high heels and a painted face that he was a pederast. I think Pierre Loti was everything. He loved men and he loved women and if there had been a third sex he would have loved that one too."Adored and scorned by French society in equal measure, Loti spent his life escaping the constraints of bourgeois France — and in so doing redefined his age. He travelled the South Seas, Asia and the Middle East (his great obsession). Although loyal to France, by the end of his life, Loti’s opposition to Imperialism was despairingly vociferous. His writings were coloured by an Eastern glow as was his whole life. NOEL PERRIN, WASHINGTON POST: Lesley Blanch has written an exceptionally good biography of an exceptionally interesting man. PHILIP MANSEL: In this haunting biography Lesley Blanch shows herself a sympathetic historian, consulting manuscript letters and diaries as well as Loti's innumerable publications. Her book is a labour of love, an enquiry into a very complex man, as well as one brilliant escapist writing about another. GABRIELLE ANNAN, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: What makes Loti so extraordinary and this book so enthralling is not that he was an escapist, but that he was an escapologist, getting out of scrapes and away with behaviour that would normally lead to disaster, disgrace, even death. Lesley Blanch is a most congenial biographer for this eccentric man . . . She has a natural sympathy with people who live out their fantasies . . . She also has the sense of humour her subject lacks, and is very funny without ever being unkind.

Pierre Loti: Portrait of an Escapist

Arts & Literature

Lesley Blanch’s novella-length introduction to the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, the reigning courtesan of Regency London, was first published in 1955 in New York, where she was then living with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. The Wilder Shores of Love, for which Blanch is chiefly remembered, had been published to acclaim the previous year. Harriette Wilson lived among and was an integral part of a wealthy society where privilege, arrogance and leisure flourished. The greatest courtesan of her age, her patrons included many of the distinguished men of her day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. Her weapons of allure were beauty, style and wit. She held court in a box at the opera and competed with her courtesan sisters for status and prestige.“Harriette Wilson’s life was deplorable – but how readable!” Blanch exclaims. The motive for writing the Memoirs, published in 1825, was blackmail, or “a desperate effort to live by my wits,” as Wilson put it. She was in her thirties, her looks were fading away as were her admirers, and the annuity she had been promised by the Duke of Beaufort in exchange for leaving alone his heir, the Marquis of Worcester, had been cut off. Wilson offered to edit out of her Memoirs any lovers who paid 200 pounds, thereby holding the British aristocracy to ransom. Certain men who bought her silence were excluded, while others who paid highly were hugely flattered. Those who were brave enough to stand up to her were ridiculed and shamed − most famously the Duke of Wellington: “Publish and be damned!” he cried. She did and she was.Regency England Undressed: Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age also offers intimately detailed portraits of eccentrics, individualists and the demi-monde. Blanch’s Biographical Notes in the Appendix read like a raffish Who's Who of Regency England, and Europe too. She brings the distant past to life so it reads like a novel; precise in its curious detail and bold in its historical panache.

Regency England Undressed: Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age

Historical

“On June 1940, while evacuation from Dunkirk was taking place in the north, my son was born at Cauderan near Bordeaux; we were part of the exodus which was surging down the roads to the south throughout June, at times under bombs from Italian planes.” So begins Gael Elton Mayo’s nail-biting autobiography. Shot at by the Nazis whilst escaping into Free France with her baby son and stateless White Russian husband; boarding a refugee ship sailing from Spain to South America, Gael eventually reaches the safety of New York, only to return to war-ravaged Europe. She writes of bohemian life in Spain in the 1950s and Paris in the 1960s; and describes working with Robert Capa and David Seymour at Magnum photographers – both were killed, in Vietnam and Suez – and with Henri Cartier-Bresson in England for Capa’s brainchild, ‘Generation X’. Her Australian-born father was a renowned industrial psychologist at Harvard. The traumatic impact of being sent away to boarding school aged eight scarred Gael for life. Artist, novelist, journalist and mother, her chaotic life travelling back and forth between America and Europe was beset by financial insecurity, broken marriages, intermittent love affairs and, in later years, recurring attacks of facial cancer. First-hand accounts of World War Two and the fight for freedom against authoritarian populism are ominously relevant to Western democracies today. The Mad Mosaic stands as a triumph of the human spirit over adversity. It is a tale of courage and optimism; survival and hope. SEAMUS HEANEY, OBSERVER – An exhilarating autobiography GLASGOW SUNDAY STANDARD – Few refugee stories outside the Auschwitz range have the peculiar poignancy of Gael Elton Mayo’s. ALASTAIR FORBES, SPECTATOR – A compulsively readable, and often deeply moving account of an unusually careless if seldom carefree life led in a rather crazy cat’s-cradle criss-cross between American and Europe. ELIZABETH LONGFORD, BOOKS & BOOKMEN – I have never read an autobiography like this one. I was hooked after the first half-dozen pages. A mixture of Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. IRISH TIMES – An interesting woman and a cool intelligent writer. BIRMINGHAM POST – Full of lively comment and atmospheric description. COURIER MAIL – Her pen inks the period in brilliant cameos. The pictures show a wistful sense of how much that was simple and good about life has been lost in humankind’s rush towards the end of the 20th century. Her story is a reflection of life as lived by the free thinkers of the period. THE TIMES – The Mad Mosaic has about it something of the disturbing impermanence of life depicted in the film Casablanca. Gael Elton Mayo (1923-92) was the youngest daughter of a pioneering, Australian-born professor of industrial psychology at Harvard. She married a white Russian during World War Two, when she was seventeen, and nearly died of puerperal fever after giving birth to their son during the bombardment of Bordeaux. They eventually escaped from war-torn France, recounted in her first novel published by Doubleday, New York, when she was twenty. As a writer she had five more novels published and three volumes of autobiography & memoir; as a painter she had nine exhibitions; and as a singer-songwriter she appeared on TV. She endured numerous facial cancer operations in the later years of her life.

The Mad Mosaic: A Life Story

Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places

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