Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure - Hardcover

Cooper, Artemis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 159017674X ISBN 13: 9781590176740

Publisher: New York Review Books, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Artemis Cooper is the author of several books, including Cairo in the War, 1939–1945; the authorized biography of Elizabeth David, Writing at the Kitchen Table; and with her husband, the historian Antony Beevor, Paris After the Liberation, 1944–1949. Among the volumes she has edited are Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Words of Mercury and the correspondence between Evelyn Waugh and Cooper’s famous grandmother, Lady Diana Cooper.

Six books by Patrick Leigh Fermor are published by NYRB Classics:  A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water; A Time to Keep Silence; Mani; Roumeli; and The Traveller's Tree. Also, NYRB is the publisher of In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Reviews

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) was a legendary British travel writer, who, in the early 1930s, while still a teenager, walked from one end of Europe to the other. Later, his experiences were written up in the two books (out of the several he wrote) for which he is most remembered, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), which together chronicled his step-by-step trek across mountains, rivers, and national borders, finding food and lodging where he could, the latter often in barns. His natural charm and good looks brought him into contact with people from all walks of life, from gypsies to aristocrats. Cooper’s definitive biography follows in sparkling detail this life-defining sojourn and also the other major factors in a long and colorful life, including military service in WWII, during which he fought with the resistance forces on Crete. Fermor’s exuberant personality often rubbed people the wrong way, and his baroque writing style, on exhibit in all his books, aroused controversy as well. But avid readers of travel literature should know this man, and here is the place to start. --Brad Hooper

Edition details

• Publisher: New York Review Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159017674X
• ISBN 13: 9781590176740
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480