Patrick Leigh Fermor

In 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on an extraordinary journey by foot—from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary. It is a book of compelling glimpses—not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world's grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic. First published to enormous acclaim, it confirmed Fermor's reputation as the greatest living travel writer, and has, together with its sequel Between the Woods and the Water (the third volume is famously yet to be published), been a perennial seller for 25 years.

Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts , Patrick Leigh Fermor writes about walking from Hungary to the Balkans. 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 the winter of 1933 eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him the better part of a year. Decades later, when he was well over fifty, 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, delightful, and beautifully-written travel books of all time.The Broken Road is the long and avidly 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 prize-winning 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 Rumania 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 diary from the winter of 1934, when he had reached Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for: across the space of three quarters of century we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.

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.”

The Mani, at the tip of Greece's-and Europe's-southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people's daily lives.Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has been described as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene," bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here, in the book that confirmed his reputation as one of the English language's finest writers of prose, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore.Mani is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor's celebrated Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.

Get lost in northern Greece with one of the greatest travel writers of the 20th century as he travels to monasteries, among shepherds, and throughout the hills, mountains, and rugged coastline of this enchanted land. 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 Travels in the Southern Peloponnese .

On an Aegean island one summer, an English traveller meets an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman. He is captivated by a painting she owns of a busy Caribbean port overlooked by a volcano and, in time, she shares the story of her youth there in the early twentieth century. Set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, hers is a tale of romantic intrigue and decadence amongst the descendents of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. But on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, catastrophe overwhelms the island and the world she knew came to an abrupt and haunting end. The Violins of Saint-Jacques captures the unforeseen drama of forces beyond human control. Originally published in 1953, it was immediately hailed as a rare and exotic sweep of colour across the drab monochrome of the post-war years, and it has lost nothing of its original flavour.

One of the greatest feats in Patrick Leigh Fermor's remarkable life was the kidnapping of General Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, on 26 April 1944. He and Captain Billy Moss hatched a daring plan to abduct the general, while ensuring that no reprisals were taken against the Cretan population.Dressed as German military police, they stopped and took control of Kreipe's car, drove through twenty-two German checkpoints, then succeeded in hiding from the German army before finally being picked up on a beach in the south of the island and transported to safety in Egypt on 14 May.Abducting a General is Leigh Fermor's own account of the kidnap, published for the first time. Written in his inimitable prose, and introduced by acclaimed SOE historian Professor Roderick Bailey, it is a glorious first-hand 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 yet still retaining his remarkable prose skills, which bring the immediacy of SOE operations vividly alive, as well as the peril which the SOE and Resistance were operating under; and a guide to the journey that Kreipe was taken on from the abandonment of his car to the embarkation site so that the modern visitor can relive this extraordinary event.

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 .

Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 18 when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, described many years later in "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". It was during these early wanderings that he started to pick up languages, and where he developed his extraordinary sense of the continuity of a quality that deepens the colours of every place he writes about, from the peaks of the Pyrenees to the cell of a Trappist monastery. His experiences in wartime Crete sealed the deep affection he had already developed for Greece, a country whose character and customs he celebrates in two books, "Mani" and "Roumeli", and where he has lived for over forty years. Whether he is drawing portraits in Vienna or sketching Byron's slippers in Missolonghi, the Leigh Fermor touch is unmistakable. Its infectious enthusiasm is driven by an insatiable curiosity and an omnivorous mind - all inspired by a passion for words and language that makes him one of the greatest prose writers of his generation.

In 1971 the celebrated traveller Patrick Leigh Fermor accompanied five friends on a remarkable journey into the high Andes of Peru. His adventure took him from Cuzco to Urubamba, on to Puno and Juli on Lake Titicaca, down to Arequipa and finally back to Lima. The expedition was led by a writer and poet and the party included a Swiss international skier and jeweller, a social anthropologist from Provence and a Nottinghamshire farming squire - all seasoned mountaineers. The other two participants - the author himself and a botany-loving duke - were complete novices. As the group travelled from Lima into increasingly remote parts of the country, Leigh Fermor captured their experiences in a series of letters to his wife. Whether recounting the thrill of crossing a glacier, the rigours of campsite life under a blanket of snow, their lively encounters with locals or the strangely moving sight of a lone condor circling in the sky, the author vividly conveys the excitement of discovery and the intense uniqueness of the land.

Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly entertaining letter writer. This judiciously edited selection of his correspondence spans almost 70 years and includes letters to Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper, Lawrence Durrell and his lifelong companion Joan Rayner. They sparkle with his humour, zest for life, unending curiosity, lyrical descriptive powers – and his tendency to get into scrapes. Off-mint.

Handsome, spirited, and well-read, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a wonderful friend. Spanning over seventy years, from ten days before Leigh Fermor's twenty-fifth birthday to his ninety-fourth year, the letters collected here are a testament to his remarkable life. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper, and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner. As in his travel memoirs, Leigh Fermor's letters convey the writer's insatiable lust for life, love of language, and appetite for adventure. Here, he records stories about hunting for Byron's slippers in remote Greece and being dismissed from Somerset Maugham's villa. Each letter radiates warmth and each letter is entertaining, just like Leigh Fermor himself.

The first collection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post, delighted critics and public alike. This second volume, More Dashing, presents a further selection of letters that exude a zest for life and adventure characteristic of the man known to all as 'Paddy'.Paddy's exuberant letters 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 recognised as one of the greatest travel writers of his time, and now it is evident that his best letters are as good as any in the English language. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed than in his letters, skilfully edited in this collection by Adam Sisman.

A young man embarks on an epic journey.This extract is from Patrick Leigh Fermor's book 'A Time of Gifts'.

Ο σερ Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ (1915 - 2011), "κυρ Μιχάλης" για τους Μανιάτες φίλους του, θεωρείται ο μεγαλύτερος ταξιδιωτικός συγγραφέας της εποχής μας και μια θρυλική φυσιογνωμία που συνέδεσε τη ζωή του με την Ελλάδα. Οι περιπλανήσεις του ξεκινούν από την ηλικία των 18 ετών, το 1933, όταν αντί να ακολουθήσει τη στρατιωτική σταδιοδρομία για την οποία τον προόριζαν, πέρασε τη Μάγχη και ξεκίνησε να διασχίσει την Ευρώπη με τα πόδια, με προορισμό την Κωνσταντινούπολη. Υποκινημένος από την ασίγαστη περιέργειά του για τον κόσμο, πραγματοποίησε αυτό το μυθικό κατόρθωμα, περνώντας από διάφορες δοκιμασίες. Τις εμπειρίες του από το ταξίδι αυτό καταγράφει σε μια τριλογία που χρειάστηκε μια ζωή για να γραφτεί - ο τρίτος τόμος με τίτλο "Ατέλειωτος δρόμος" κυκλοφόρησε μετά τον θάνατό του. Στην παρούσα συγκεντρωτική έκδοση περιλαμβάνονται τα δύο πρώτα βιβλία της τριλογίας: "Η εποχή της δωρεάς" (το ταξίδι από την Ολλανδία μέχρι την ουγγρική μεθόριο) και "Ανάμεσα στα δάση και τα νερά" (το ταξίδι από τη Βουδαπέστη ως τις Σιδηρές Πύλες του Δούναβη). (Από την παρουσίαση στο οπισθόφυλλο του βιβλίου)"['Ηθελα] ν' αλλάξω σκηνικό, να εγκαταλείψω το Λονδίνο και την Αγγλία και να σεργιανίσω την Ευρώπη σαν απλός αλήτης ή -σύμφωνα με πιο προσωπική διατύπωση- σαν φτωχός προσκυνητής ή περιπλανώμενος καλόγερος, ένας περιηγητής φιλόσοφος, ένας μοναχικός ιππότης". (ΠΑΤΡΙΚ ΛΗ ΦΕΡΜΟΡ)"Το χρονικό της περιπλάνησης του Φέρμορ στην Ευρώπη είναι ένας λογοτεχνικός θησαυρός, ένα υπέροχο αμάλγαμα δράσης και παρατήρησης". (The Observer)"Ο Φέρμορ γράφει με ασύγκριτη φρεσκάδα και ωριμότητα. Ο νεανικός ενθουσιασμός του μετουσιώνεται σ΄ένα ύφος λιτό, φυσικό, απαλλαγμένο από καθετί περιττό". (Le Figaro Litteraire)

This boxed set brings together Patrick Leigh Fermor's three most beloved books A Time for Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road, which together comprise Leigh Fermor's account of his legendary, youthful trek across pre-WWII Europe. This is a perfect gift for the holidays for both the uninitiated and the long-time Leigh Fermor fan.

Auf der Suche nach Ruhe und Abgeschiedenheit verbringt Patrick Leigh Fermor einige Zeit als Gast in französischen Klöstern. In zauberhaften Beschreibungen berichtet er als Außenseiter von den Innenwelten von St. Wandrille, Solesme, La Grande Trappe und schließlich den Felsenklöstern Kappadokiens. Er erzählt vom Mysterium der Stille, der Geschichte der Klöster und nähert sich dem Geheimnis des mönchischen Lebens, indem er die Aura des Friedens und der Gelassenheit heraufbeschwört, die die Mönche umgibt und die sich auf ihren Gast überträgt.

時光的禮物：從荷蘭角港到多瑙河中游的青春浪遊