I only learned of her a few years ago when I saw her obituary. She passed away at the age of 103. Since that time I´ve read several of her books.  

Wilder Shores of Love

and

Sabres of Paradise

"She paused for effect, and because the evening train to Strasbourg shot past yards from where we sat, concealed behind thickets of bamboo and cypress, olive and fig. The white dove fluttered in alarm. A toad croaked in the garden and from the house came the strains of Turkish flutes and mingled smells of incense and roasting meat.

Mrs Blanch wore a Tunisian caftan of silk and the blue of a thrush’s egg and a necklace of lapis lazuli. The French Riviera is, of course, no longer smart and her elegant friends have moved inland to build houses with what she calls swimming baths, but she herself has a teasing allure and ineffable style and she is just as much fun as a roomful of exotic people. Like them she has alternatives. Having read The Sabres of Paradise (her book about Shamyl, the 19th-century prophet and warrior leader of Moslem tribes in the Caucasus), some members of the Shamyl family were very keen that she should marry one of his descendants.

“I was very silly not to,” she said. “I met them too late for love but I would have had a beautiful house on the Bosphorous. I do not like Europe, you see. I am bored utterly with it, washed up here because I am too tired to move. It is merely convenient for me. I go whizzing into Nice on the train to the movies, or to see a most delightful friend who feeds me caviare for lunch and talks music. Or I can be in Italy in seven minutes. I could go to Monte Carlo, that sink of vulgarity, but I never would.

“I’ve broken my leg twice capering about the garden so I don’t walk so well, which makes it difficult to carry much luggage at the airport; otherwise I’d be off. I long, I long, I ache to go to the Sahara; I would love to go back to Oman; Afghanistan I ache for; for Central Asia, Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan, Turkoman… Everywhere you go now, they want you on a tour and you have to share a bedroom. In the past, in other circumstances, I might have shared not a bedroom but a tent. I get nostalgic for Persia and I would love to wander about in India again for a bit.

“My idea of horror is one of those culture tours where you are told about it and then meet nicely dressed for dinner to be all so charming together.” She would be very disruptive on such a tour.