In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor Hardcover - 2010

Media reviews

"Spanning 1954 to 2007, the volume reads like an accidental memoir of a disappearing world stretching from the manor houses of the English aristocracy to the olive groves of Greece, its people and places rendered with a kind of care that’s becoming scarce in our age of helter-skelter communication. At the same time, the book’s title, a phrase deriving from Leigh Fermor’s habit of dashing off messages ‘with a foot in the stirrup,’ captures the vigor and bustle of the lives that nourished the correspondence….In Tearing Haste is engaging from start to finish. There isn’t a dull letter among Charlotte Mosley’s selections. Even her annotations, often incorporating information from the book’s two correspondents, are as surprising as they are informative….More than anything else, the collection is important as an addition to Leigh Fermor’s body of work, both because his letters constitute a larger portion of the volume and because the writing in them harmonizes with the books that established his literary reputation." —The Nation

"This is a book that evokes a lost world of glamour, intelligence and personal scruples. The memory of its pristine landscapes, resolute gaiety and eccentric characters leaves a glorious afterglow." —Sunday Telegraph

"Spanning half a century, bursting with wit and conviviality…the result is surely one of the great 20th-century correspondences." —The Observer (London)

"This marvelous correspondence celebrates two of the most important things in the world, courage and friendship" —The Spectator

"Highly engaging exchanges of mutual joie de vivre." —The Times

"As full of fizz and conviviality as a glass of champagne" —Metro

"A feast for reading…An enchanting book." —Irish Examiner

"Chatty, witty, teasing, gossipy, relentlessly cheerful and with more than a hint of modest good sense, her short replies bounce off his beautiful essays like volleys of tennis balls off a cathedral." —The Scotsman