Time Was Away A Notebook in Corsica

First Edition, first printing. 189 pages. Publisher's yellow cloth with green titles to the backstrip. With the striking dust-jacket by English draughtsman-artist John Minton, with the first state price of 21s printed at bottom of the front flap. Over 50 illustrations by Minton including many full-page examples and eight in colour. Untorn jacket has just some light rubbing to ends of the backstrip to detract. A fine copy. That is Alan Ross describing Corsica in 1947 which he and the artist John Minton visited, in the footsteps of Edward Lear, expressly to write this book. Although admitting, perhaps too modestly, to the influence of Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads and Journey Without Maps and therefore 'too inclined to see Corsica in terms of defeated priests, corrupt politicians and saintly monks' he wrote one of the best travel books since the Second World War. It is, in fact, a collaboration between a gifted writer and the most romantic artist of his generation, and, in its own lesser way, it played a part, alongside the early Elizabeth Davids (also illustrated by John Minton), of reminding drab, grey, post-war Britain of a warmer, sunnier, more colourful alternative: the Mediterranean.