There is no resisting the spell cast by Lesley Blanch’s words. You just have to recline, metaphorically, in your turban and beads among tasselled cushions under a fretted moucharabiyeh and be engulfed by the rich colours and textures, the elegance and the drama of her writing. Like the heroines of her first book, The Wilder Shores of Love, which catapulted her to fame in 1954 and follows the fortunes of four remarkable 19th-century women who travelled eastward in pursuit of romance, Blanch herself was lured by the exotic. ‘I am like the pine tree of Heine’s famous poem, forever dreaming, on some desolate northern shore, of a distant palm tree in the Eastern lands.’

Until her death in 2007, aged almost 103, she retained a powerful sense of her ‘Darling Self’ and remained a brilliant raconteuse with the face of a Baroque angel. I will never forget my one visit to her pink-washed villa on a hillside above Menton: taking the train