Smelling the Breezes - Ralph and Molly Izzard

£14.99

Smelling the Breezes is an inspiring family adventure, a three-hundred mile walk down the spine of the Lebanon with four children, two donkeys and Elias, the family’s gardener, nursemaid and friend. The journey took them over towering passes, through immense gorges and into the lives of the mountain villages and highland herdsmen. The presence of four small but redoubtable blonde children proved to be a passport that threw open every door, whatever the politics, religion and ethnicity of the household.

Smelling the Breezes is a magnificent portrait of Lebanon in all its rich complexity and easy charm: broken castles, hashish smugglers, clan-feuds, festivals, forgotten temples, secretive headquarters and hospitable sheikhs.

‘This is the way to travel – four children and two donkeys – and this is the way to write a travel book.’ Birmingham Evening Post

‘a fascinating story of the adventure, the hardships and pleasures.’ Leicester Evening News

Smelling the Breezes is an inspiring family adventure, a three-hundred mile walk down the spine of the Lebanon with four children, two donkeys and Elias, the family’s gardener, nursemaid and friend. The journey took them over towering passes, through immense gorges and into the lives of the mountain villages and highland herdsmen. The presence of four small but redoubtable blonde children proved to be a passport that threw open every door, whatever the politics, religion and ethnicity of the household.

Smelling the Breezes is a magnificent portrait of Lebanon in all its rich complexity and easy charm: broken castles, hashish smugglers, clan-feuds, festivals, forgotten temples, secretive headquarters and hospitable sheikhs.

‘This is the way to travel – four children and two donkeys – and this is the way to write a travel book.’ Birmingham Evening Post

‘a fascinating story of the adventure, the hardships and pleasures.’ Leicester Evening News

Smelling the Breezes: A Journey through the High Lebanon in 1957
ISBN: 978-1-78060-198-4
Format: 240pp demi pb
Place: Lebanon

Author Biography

There is a fascinating subtext for the modern reader. Ralph Izzard had been a heroic figure within Naval Intelligence in the War and was one of Ian Fleming’s role models out of which he created the fictional James Bond. Have you ever idly wondered what James Bond would have been like as a father? Well then, read Smelling the Breezes. Not exactly settled down, but a foreign correspondent living in Beirut with a beautiful, adventurous and intelligent wife, Molly Crutchleigh-FitzPatrick.