Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters
- ISBN-10
- 1681371561
- ISBN-13
- 9781681371566
- Series
- Patrick Leigh Fermor
- Category
- Literary Collections
- Pages
- 512
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-11-14
- Publisher
- New York Review of Books
- Author
- Patrick Leigh Fermor
Description
The first extensive collection of letters written by war hero and travel writing legend Patrick Leigh Fermor. 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 wonderful 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, and the correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper, and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner. The letters exhibit many of Fermor’s most engaging characteristics: his lust 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; and hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight. The letters radiate warmth and gaiety; many are enhanced with witty illustrations and comic verse, while others contain riddles and puns. Every one of them entertains.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2018-05-20
- 310 pages
- Ebook
- Central European University Press
Similar books
-
A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube
By Patrick Leigh FermorA 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.
-
Mani
By Patrick Leigh FermorThis is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past.
-
A Time to Keep Silence
By Patrick Leigh FermorMore than a history or travel journal, however, this beautiful short book is a meditation on the meaning of silence and solitude for modern life.
-
Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates
By Patrick Leigh FermorThe opening of the book finds Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube—at the very moment where his first volume left off.
-
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos
By Patrick Leigh Fermor... a merethread ofattarto each,and sold, understandably, for enormous prices.The smell is captious, overpowering anda little cloying. The perfumes of Arabia that, in spiteoftheir power, failedto chase the reek of Duncan's blood from ...
-
Loose As the Wind
By Patrick Leigh FermorLoose As the Wind
-
Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn
By Nick HuntThe books he later wrote about this walk, A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and the posthumous The Broken Road are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct, landscapes irrevocably altered by ...
-
Words of Mercury: Tales from a Lifetime of Travel
By Patrick Leigh FermorWords of Mercury collects pieces from every stage of 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 ...
-
Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete
By Patrick Leigh FermorAlso 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 ...
-
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
By Patrick Leigh FermorHere, 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 ...