Corsair Country
FIELDING, Xan
The Diary of a Journey along the Barbary Coast.
Published: Secker & Warburg, [1958]
Stock code: 10819
Price: £110.00
8vo., First Edition, with 13 plates and rear endpaper map; cloth, backstrip lettered in silver, a very good, bright, clean copy in price-clipped, lightly age-soiled dustwrapper.
Evocative travel diary. Fielding (1918-1991) was one of the first SOE agents (with Paddy Leigh Fermor and Dick Barnes) to be landed in Crete where he spent two years or so in a precarious game of hide and seek with the occupying Germans. Arrested in France later in the war, he was saved from execution by the Polish SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek. In post-war years a close friend of Lawrence Durrell, Fielding developed a career as writer and translator, achieving acclaim for his translation of 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. Scarce, especially in this condition.