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Adam Sisman is an award-winning writer, author of Boswell's Presumptuous Task, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and biographer of John Le Carre, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He selected and edited Dashing for the Post, an earlier volume of the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and (with Richard Davenport-Hines) One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper. He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Bristol.
Paddy Leigh Fermor was a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly an equal in his generation ... The letters are flirty, funny, lively and revealing. A few bring to mind his extravagant, generous, witty, meandering style of conversation; others show his magpie mind; the best contain some of the finest descriptive writing he ever committed to paper. Adam Sisman should be congratulated on this feat of literary archaeology and for excavating for Paddy's fans a last marvellous treasure trove of Leigh Fermor prose -- William Dalrymple Remarkably, this second volume, again expertly edited by Adam Sisman, contains, if anything, a more varied and colourful selection than the first ... No fan will be disappointed -- Hamish Robinson * Oldie * Wow - one tour de force after another! The best letters are as good as - if not better than - any in the language: Byron's, Walpole's, Henry James's, Freya Stark's. Often I laughed aloud, tears coursing down the cheeks -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', John Julius Norwich Adam Sisman is a model editor ... Reading these letters is like gobbling down a tray of exotically filled chocolates, with no horrible orange creams to put you off -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', Harry Mount * Literary Review * Zest, verbal finesse, almost pristine receptivity and a richly informed cultural and historical consciousness make these letters, even when the erosions of time and illness shadow them, irresistibly exhilarating -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post' * Sunday Times *
