VALSE DES FLEURS BY SACHEVERELL SITWELL

Valse des Fleurs by Sacheverell Sitwell recreates one glittering winter’s day in St Petersburg in its heyday.

Valse des Fleurs: A day in St.Petersburg in 1868 by Sacheverell Sitwell

ISBN: 978-1906011-14-7

Format: 152pp demi pb

Place: Russia

Thirty-three years ago, John Hatt set up as a publisher creating ELAND BOOKS, a company born at south London. John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. You wouldn’t have wanted to put any money on it, but only the Eland list has endured. Nowadays, E-editions enable our books to be read in parts of the world where bookshops do not exist, but otherwise Eland continues, very much as it first started, with between two and eight new titles a year, and run from an attic. It is a classic tale of the Hare and the Tortoise, or should one say the Leopard and the Eland. For one of the defining characteristics of the Eland is that it is no good at high speeds but ‘can trot along at fourteen miles an hour indefinitely.’  

‘… contains some of the finest prose written in our day.’ – Kenneth Clarke

‘… the best piece of sustained imaginative prose Sitwell ever composed.’ – Neil Ritchie