Twelve Days – An Account of a Journey Across the Bakhtiari Mountains of South-western Persia –

“In the mid-1920s Vita Sackville-West and her diplomat husband Harold Nicolson followed an old caravan trail across the forbidding mountains rising southwest of Isfahan. In the best tradition of English travellers they had no particular reason for making the journey.

Vita photographs a mounted dervish who promptly falls off his horse; she searches for iris bulbs for her English garden; Harold complains that he cannot go on – not with the journey, but with the book he is proofing – and Vita saves her husband’s bacon with his London publishers, while he never misses an opportunity to berate her for getting lost amongst the nomads.

It is an oddly domestic book, set in the least domestic surroundings; it is full of humour and reflection, while managing to seem inconsequential; and it is the best travel book she ever wrote.”