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Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Patrick Leigh Fermor
 
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Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier, best known as Paddy Fermor, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II.[1] He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer",[2] with books including his classic A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene."[3]
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Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier, best known as Paddy Fermor, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II.[1] He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer",[2] with books including his classic A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene."[3]
Books by thisAuthor
(9)
  • A Time of Gifts

    A Time of Gifts
    On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of...
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    Roumeli

    Roumeli
    Travels in Northern Greece
    Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once given to northern Greece—stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth, a name that evokes a world where the present is inseparably bound up with the past. Roumeli describes Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wanderings in and around this mysterious and yet very real region. He takes us with him among Sarakatsan shepherds, to the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, and on a mission to track down a pair of Byron’s slippers at Missolonghi. As he does, he brings to light the inherent conflicts of the Greek inheritance—the tenuous links to the classical and Byzantine heritage, the legacy of Ottoman domination—along with an underlying, even older world, traces of which Leigh Fermor finds in the hills and mountains and along stretches of barely explored coast. Roumeli is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese.
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    The Traveller's Tree

    The Traveller's Tree
    A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands
    In the late 1940s Patrick Leigh Fermor, now widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest travel writers, set out to explore the then relatively little-visited islands of the Caribbean. Rather than a comprehensive political or historical study of the region, The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor’s first book, gives us his own vivid, idiosyncratic impressions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti, among other islands. Here we watch Leigh Fermor walk the dusty roads of the countryside and the broad avenues of former colonial capitals, equally at home among the peasant and the elite, the laborer and the artist. He listens to steel drum bands, delights in the Congo dancing that closes out Havana’s Carnival, and observes vodou and Rastafarian rites, all with the generous curiosity and easy erudition that readers will recognize from his subsequent classic accounts A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.  
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    A Time to Keep Silence

    A Time to Keep Silence
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  • Between the Woods and the Water

    Between the Woods and the Water
    On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle...
    Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933—to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day—proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe, Leigh Fermor's still-unfinished account of his journey has established itself as a modern classic. Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of a projected three, has garnered as many prizes as its celebrated predecessor, A Time of Gifts. The opening of the book finds Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube—at the very moment where his first volume left off. A detour to the luminous splendors of Prague is followed bya trip downriver to Budapest, passage on horseback acrossthe Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, mountain villages,monasteries and towering ranges that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sects are all savoredin the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans, where, for now, the story ends.
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    Words of Mercury

    Words of Mercury
    The travels and writings of Britain's legendary Patrick Leigh Fermor Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 18 years old when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. It was during these early wanderings that he started to pick up languages, and where he developed his extraordinary sense of the continuity of history. Whether he is drawing portraits in Vienna or sketching Byron's slippers in Missolonghi, his touch in unmistakable. Its infectious enthusiasm is driven by an insatiable curiosity and an omnivorous mind—all inspired by a passion for words and language.
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    In Tearing Haste

    In Tearing Haste
    Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick...
    In the spring of 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, youngest of the six legendary Mitford sisters, invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the Devonshires’ house in Ireland. The halcyon visit sparked a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of highly entertaining correspondence. When something caught their interest and they knew the other would be amused, they sent off a letter—there are glimpses of President Kennedy’s inauguration, weekends at Sandringham, filming with Errol Flynn, the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, and, above all, life at Chatsworth, the great house that Debo spent much of her life restoring, and of Paddy in the house that he and his wife designed and built on the southernmost peninsula of Greece. There rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo—smart, idiosyncratic, and funny—darts from subject to subject, dashing off letters in her breezy, spontaneous style. Paddy, the polygot and widely read virtuoso, replies in the fluent polished manner that has earned him recognition as one of the finest writers in the English language. As editor Charlotte Mosley writes, “Much of the charm of the letters lies in their authors’ particular outlook on life. Both are acutely observant and clear-sighted about human failings, but their lack of cynicism and gift for looking on the bright side bear out the maxim that the world tends to treat you as you find it. On the whole, the people they meet are good to them, the places they visit enchant them, and they succeed splendidly in all they set out to do. This lightheartedness—a trait that attracted many, often less sunny, people towards them—gives their letters an irresistible fizz and sparkle.”
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    Three Letters from the Andes

    Three Letters from the Andes
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  • The Seven Deadly Sins

    The Seven Deadly Sins
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