In 1926 Vita Sackville-West travelled to Iran to visit her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was serving as a diplomat in Teheran. Her route was deliberately slow-paced - she stopped in Egypt, where she sailed up the Nile to Luxor; and India, where she visited New Delhi and Agra before sailing across the Persian Gulf to Iraq and on through bandit-infested mountains to Teheran. She returned to England in an equally circuitous manner and despite travelling under dangerous circumstances, through communist Russia and Poland in the midst of revolution, her humour and sense of adventure never failed. is a classic work, revealing the lesser-known side of one of the twentieth century's most luminous authors.