
Images and Shadows
Description
<strong>The lucidly written memoir of Iris Origo, the writer of the bestselling <em>War in Val d'Orcia</em></strong>
<em>It has only been through my affections that I have been able to perceive, however imperfectly, some faint "intimations of immortality"</em>
<em>Images and Shadows</em> is the story of those affections: for a loving, shy father, who died when his daughter was very young; for a vital, headstrong mother; for friends and family, alive and dead. And for the places Origo lived: Ireland, America, England; the childhood home in the hills above Florence; and her own beloved La Foce - the desolate, deforested estate which she and her Italian husband bought, and into which they poured the energy and patience of their best years.
Iris Origo (1902-1988) is best known as a biographer and war diarist. But in <em>Images and Shadows</em> she writes with characteristic grace, wit and humility, almost reluctantly, about herself. Reissued with newly discovered photographs, it is both a moving insight into a lost age, and an illumination of the life and loves of an endlessly curious and thoughtful woman.
Reviews / Votes
Elegant and intelligent * Spectator * A wonderful writer... Images and Shadows is as delicious and tear-inducing as Downton Abbey * New York Times * An elegiac autobiography... illuminating * Telegraph * In her biographies she was able to write precisely on the cusp between the two cultures, turning her work into a bridge of interpretation and understanding -- Tessa Hadley * London Review of Books * Self-effacing and cultivated... gently percipient * Kirkus Reviews * A true cosmopolite of vast energy and stunning intelligence * New York Times * A masterly biographer here recounts her own story, and in this biography she is at her best -- Raymond Mortimer Origo was a remarkable writer, with a clear, engaging style, a mind steeped in history and scholarship, but alive always to the nuances and subtleties of human relationships. The hope is that [Pushkin's republication of her work] bring her a new generation of readers * TLS *More details
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