Persian: that’s the word I’ll always associate with Shusha Guppy. Uttered with a luxurious protraction of the first syllable—Purrrzhen, as if a … well, Persian cat were being stroked—it conjured up all those Oriental refinements rudely swept aside by the ayatollahs, a lost world of Hafez recitations and elaborate compliments (taarof, as she taught me to call them) paid in jewel-like gardens. Though she’d occasionally employ the bare geopolitical term “Iran,” the adjective was always “Persian,” and so was the name, in English, of her mother tongue—Allah help anyone who referred to it in her hearing as “Farsi,” which, she would witheringly point out, was like saying “Deutsch” or “français.”

Yet Shusha was no exile. While she abominated the revolution of 1979 as roundly as anyone, she had voluntarily left home long before it, and found for herself, first in France and then England, a life at least as rich as the one she’d abandoned. Just how rich I learned for myself during the seven years it was my privilege to know her. With an almost American forwardness that was one of her virtues, she’d written me about a piece I’d published on Patrick Leigh Fermor, who turned out to be a close friend of hers. Her letter, disarmingly heart-on-sleeve and full of the most generous praise, concluded by inviting me to a party to be thrown for her later that month by another friend, George Plimpton. (Until 2005, she held the aptly