On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590175174
• Category: Travel
• Page: 344
• View: 2355

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At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube. At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: John Murray
• ISBN: 1848545436
• Category: Travel
• Page: 300
• View: 2412

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This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe. Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa. Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590175212
• Category: Travel
• Page: 128
• View: 8160

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While still a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his way across Europe, as recounted in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. During World War II, he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. But in A Time to Keep Silence, Leigh Fermor writes about a more inward journey, describing his several sojourns in some of Europe’s oldest and most venerable monasteries. He stays at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, a great repository of art and learning; at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant; and at the deeply ascetic Trappist monastery of La Grande Trappe, where monks take a vow of silence. Finally, he visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, hewn from the stony spires of a moonlike landscape, where he seeks some trace of the life of the earliest Christian anchorites. More than a history or travel journal, however, this beautiful short book is a meditation on the meaning of silence and solitude for modern life. Leigh Fermor writes, “In the seclusion of a cell—an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods—the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”

A Life in Letters

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1681371561
• Category: Biography & Autobiography
• Page: 512
• View: 7572

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"The first extensive collection of letters written by war hero and travel writing legend Patrick Leigh Fermor. The letters in this volume span seventy years, from February 1940 to January 2010. The first was written ten days before Patrick Leigh Fermor's twenty-fifth birthday, when he was an officer cadet, hoping for a commission in the Irish Guards. He had hurried back to England from Romania in September 1939, expecting to die within weeks of being sent into action, like his friend who was a junior officer in the First World War. The last two were written on the same day, when Paddy (as he called himself, and almost everyone else called him) was ninety-four, a widower, very deaf, and suffering from tunnel vision, which made it hard for him to read even his own handwriting. His voice was already hoarse from the throat cancer that would kill him seventeen months later. But these last letters, like the first and most of the others printed here, exude a zest that was characteristic. From first to last, Paddy's letters radiate warmth and gaiety. Often they are decorated with witty illustrations and enhanced by comic verse. Sometimes they contain riddles and cringe-making puns"--

• Author: Artemis Cooper
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590176995
• Category: Biography & Autobiography
• Page: 480
• View: 2987

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Patrick Leigh Fermor’s enviably colorful life took off when in 1934, at the age of eighteen, he decided to walk across Europe. In just over a year he had trekked through nine countries and taught himself three languages, and his enthusiasm and curiosity for every kind of experience made him equally happy in caves or country houses, among shepherds or countesses. At the outbreak of war he left his lover, Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, in Romania and returned to England to enlist. Commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, he became one of the handful of Allied officers supporting the Cretan resistance to the German occupation. In 1944 he commanded the Anglo-Cretan team that abducted General Heinrich Kreipe and spirited him away to Egypt. A journey to the Caribbean, stays in monasteries, and explorations all over Greece provided the subjects for his first books. It was not until he and his wife had moved to southern Greece that he returned to his earliest walk. In these books, which took many years to write, he created a vision of a prewar Europe, which in its beauty and abundance has never been equaled. Artemis Cooper has drawn on years of interviews and conversations with Leigh Fermor and his closest friends, and has had complete access to his archive. Her beautifully crafted biography portrays a man of extraordinary gifts—no one wore their learning so playfully nor inspired such passionate friendship.

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590177827
• Category: Fiction
• Page: 160
• View: 8665

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"Mr. Fermor's elegant rococo fantasy about a volcanic eruption on an imaginary Caribbean island is just close enough to reality to raise a genuine shiver--possibly even a genuine tear. In truth, it is a small timeless masterpiece."--Phoebe Lou Adams, The Atlantic An NYRB Classics Original Patrick Leigh Fermor's only novel displays the same lustrous way with words as his beloved travel trilogy (A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road), the memoir of his youthful walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This slim book starts with the meeting of an English traveler and an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman on an Aegean island. He is captivated by her painting of a busy Caribbean port in the shadow of a volcano, which leads her to tell him the story of her childhood in that town back at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tale she unfolds, set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, is one of romantic intrigue and decadence involving the descendants of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. Then, on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, a whole world comes to a catastrophic and haunting end.

From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590177568
• Category: Travel
• Page: 392
• View: 6361

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In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him almost a year. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, two books now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time. The Broken Road is the long-awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts by his prizewinning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor’s books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds–in the The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy’s arrival in Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for. Throughout it we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.

Tales from a Lifetime of Travel

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
• ISBN: 1629142808
• Category: Travel
• Page: 288
• View: 9588

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A career-spanning anthology from the greatest traveler—and travel writer—of the twentieth century. The adventures of Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor, Britain’s most beloved traveler, began in 1933, when he embarked on a walk from Holland to Constantinople—the entire length of Europe—at the tender age of eighteen. Sleeping in barns, monasteries, and, on occasion, aristocratic country houses, the young adventurer made way his through the Old World just as everything was about to change. Words of Mercury collects pieces from every stage of Leigh Fermor’s life, from his journey through Eastern Europe just before the outbreak of the Second World War—described in gorgeous, meditative detail—to his encounter with voodoo in Haiti, to a monastic retreat to Normandy to try to write a book. Also included is the story of one of his most well-known exploits from the war—his planned and executed kidnap of a German general under British orders. Ever the student, “Paddy” also wrote extensively on his encounters with polymaths, linguists, and artists all over the world. Over the course of his illustrious lifetime, Leigh Fermor wrote several acclaimed travel books, countless essays, translations, and book reviews, many of which are compiled in this anthology. His unique experiences out in the world fed his insatiable curiosity and voracious appetite for scholarship. His tales, written in a singular, elegant style, have inspired generations of writers and continue to shape the language of travel.

In the Company of Patrick Leigh Fermor

• Author: Dolores Payás,Amanda Hopkinson
• Publisher: Bene Factum Publishing
• ISBN: 1909657638
• Category: Biography & Autobiography
• Page: 112
• View: 6505

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A delightful and moving account of one of the finest travel writers of the 20th century, the author of The Broken Road and A Time of GiftsIn 2009 Dolores Payás, Spanish translator of several of Patrick Leigh Fermor's books, visited her subject in his house in Greece for the first time. Out of this encounter emerged a friendship that lasted until Fermor's death in 2011. It was from those hours spent together chatting that this charming, personal, and soulful sketch of the English author and traveler was born—a man made fascinating by his life story, his charisma, his generosity, and his talent. This short book conveys a portrait of a man who became indomitable, proud, and charming in old age while retaining his other attributes. A snapshot of the colorful adventurer in his final years surrounded by drinks, guests, and above all his books, it is an original and witty study in nostalgia mixed with personal fortitude.

Travels in Northern Greece

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590175204
• Category: Travel
• Page: 280
• View: 3795

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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.

The Kreipe Operation in Crete

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590179390
• Category: Biography & Autobiography
• Page: 240
• View: 3275

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One of the most daring feats in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s daring life was the kidnapping of General Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, on April 26, 1944. Abducting a General, now published for the first time in the United States, is Leigh Fermor’s own account of the kidnapping. Written in his inimitable prose, and introduced by the acclaimed Special Operations Executive historian Roderick Bailey, it is a glorious firsthand account of one of the great adventures of the Second World War. Also included in this book are Leigh Fermor’s intelligence reports sent from caves deep within Crete, which bring the immediacy of SOE operations vividly alive, as well as the peril under which the SOE and Resistance were operating, and a guide to the journey that Kreipe took, from the abandonment of his car to the embarkation site, so that the modern visitor to Crete can relive this extraordinary trip.

A Journey Through the Carribean Islands

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590175220
• Category: Travel
• Page: 432
• View: 6244

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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.

Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor

• Author: Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford Cavendish Duchess of Devonshire,Patrick Leigh Fermor,Charlotte Mosley
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590173589
• Category: Literary Collections
• Page: 390
• View: 3405

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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 sporadic but highly entertaining letters. There rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed illiterate (though suspected by her friends of being a secret reader), darts from subject to subject, dashing off letters in her “whizz-bang planchette style”; while Paddy, polyglot, widely read prose virtuoso, replies in the fluent, polished manner that has earned him recognition as one of the finest writers in the English language. Prose notwithstanding, the two friends have much in common: a huge enjoyment of life, youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity, and lack of malice. There are glimpses of President Kennedy’s inauguration, weekends at Sandringham, stag hunting in France, filming with Errol Flynn, 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, Joan, designed and built on the southernmost peninsula of Greece.

The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: John Murray
• ISBN: 9781473622494
• Category: Soldiers
• Page: 496
• View: 6811

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A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road. Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend. The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddy's twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance and his tendency to get into scrapes - particularly when drinking and, quite separately, driving. Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byron's slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe's abduction; his extensive travels. Some letters contain glimpses of the great and the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.

On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• ISBN: 1590175182
• Category: Travel
• Page: 288
• View: 6571

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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 by a trip downriver to Budapest, passage on horseback across the 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 savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans, where, for now, the story ends.

In Patrick Leigh Fermor's footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn

• Author: Nick Hunt
• Publisher: Hachette UK
• ISBN: 1857889533
• Category: Travel
• Page: 336
• View: 6472

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Nick Hunt pays homage to Patrick Leigh Fermor by walking the same route across Europe in this "glorious book."

Further Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: N.A
• ISBN: 9781408893661
• Category:
• Page: 464
• View: 2845

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Dashing for the Post, the first selection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor (known to all as 'Paddy'), delighted critics and public alike. Here now is a further selection, More Dashing, offering equal pleasure.Paddy's exuberant letters exude a zest characteristic of the man. They contain glimpses of the great and the good: a chance conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, when Paddy opens the wrong door, or a glass of ouzo under the pine trees with Harold Macmillan. They describe encounters with such varied figures as Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson; while also relating adventures with the humble: a 'pick-nick' with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a drunken celebration in the Cretan mountains with his old comrades from the resistance, most of them simple shepherds and goatherds. Paddy was at ease in any company, unfailingly charming, boyish, gentle and fun.Patrick Leigh Fermor has long been recognized as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. Now it is evident that his best letters are as good as any in the language. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed. More Dashing will not disappoint.

• Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Publisher: N.A
• ISBN: 9780146001253
• Category: Europe
• Page: 55
• View: 9905

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• Author: Helias Doundoulakis ; Gabriella Gafni
• Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
• ISBN: 1503587444
• Category: Biography & Autobiography
• Page: 92
• View: 4632

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Although many accounts have been written about Patrick Leigh Fermor, the great travel writer, prose poet, adventurer and Renaissance man, few are more deeply personal and direct than this narrative by Helias Doundoulakis, author of I Was Trained To Be a Spy, Books I & II. The German presence was still everywhere on the island of Crete in July, 1942 when Helias, a nineteen-year-old member of his brother George’s famed resistance movement, went to the bus station in Chania Porte to greet Patrick Leigh Fermor (then known to the Greeks by his code name, “Mihalis”), who was scheduled to replace Captain Thomas Dunbabin of the Special Operations Executive (the “SOE”), the British equivalent of the United States Office of Strategic Services (the “OSS”), formed to assist local resistance movements fighting against the Axis powers. Filled with a spirit of adventure, young Helias hardly knew what to expect of the new captain, and was stunned when he encountered the charismatic Leigh Fermor, whose carefree - often dangerous - approach to life excited and intrigued the boy. What followed was a unique lifetime friendship that surpassed both men’s expectations. Now, in his golden years, the author pays tribute to his memories of Leigh Fermor, and commemorates a time long gone, but never forgotten. Read this compelling account, and get to know two very remarkable figures and the heroes that supported the cause of freedom.