Book description
Admirers of The Spanish Temper, Marching Spain and his wonderfully
evocative books on London, Dublin and New York will need no reminding
that V. S. Pritchett is one of the very great travel writers of our
time, possessed of an astonishingly accurate eye and a marvellous
ability to conjure up the essence of a place, and of the people who live
there.
Written for the most part in the 1950s and 1960s, the essays brought
together in At Home and Abroad cover South and North America, Spain,
Ireland, Portugal, London, Greece, the Pyrenees, Germany, the English
countryside and, above all, the Mediterranean: published in book form in
the year of Sir Victor's ninetieth birthday, they are a delight in
themselves and a timely reminder of - or introduction to - this most
subtle and perceptive of writers. Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900-1997)
was born over a toyshop in 1900 and, much to his everlasting distaste,
was named after Queen Victoria. A writer and critic, his is widely
reputed to be one of the best short story writers of all time, with the
rare ability to capture the extraordinary strangeness of everyday life.
