A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

Product Information

Take Schloss Schönbühel, on the banks of the Danube, north of Melk, “gleaming as though it were carved ivory .

The Broken Road – Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos (2013), edited by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron from PLF's unfinished manuscript of the third volume of his account of his walk across Europe in the 1930s. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. After his walk across Europe, Patrick Leigh Fermor lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. His knowledge of modern Greek gained him a commission in the General List in August 1940 [13] and he became a liaison officer in Albania.With his wishes for godspeed in my ears and an internal bonfire of Bols and a hand smarting from his valedictory shake, I set off. A second volume, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), begins with the author crossing the Mária Valéria bridge from Czechoslovakia into Hungary and ends when he reaches the Iron Gate, where the Danube formed the boundary between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Romania.

And Fermor’s description of colours is equally memorable – “scumbled gold” and “the shrill sulphur hue Mantegna loved”; I turned down those pages to enjoy them again later. Like Byron, he treats the cathedrals, castles, and local history solely as food for his imagination. and, in sum, strikes me as a purely pedantic inclusion—a word used because he knew it and not because it fit. A shutter went up and a stout man in clogs opened a glass door, deposited a tabby on the snow and, turning back, began lighting a stove inside.Architecture, art, genealogy, quirks of history and language are all devoured – and here passed on – with a gusto uniquely his.

The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers. The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote: "Mr Leigh Fermor never loses sight of the fact, not always grasped by superficial visitors, that most of the problems of the West Indies are the direct legacy of the slave trade. For the last few months of his life Leigh Fermor suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. Leigh Fermor deploys recondite words, the names of painters and poets, and the weighty facts of history, neither to express deep sentiment nor to communicate insights, but as mere ornament. Well, to get straight to the point, even by the end of the introduction I found myself disappointed.Sir Max Hastings first met Leigh Fermor in his early twenties: "Across the lunch table of a London club, hearing him swapping anecdotes, in four or five languages, quite effortlessly, without showing off. The unusual vantage point of these books lends them great poignancy, for we and the author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor cannot: that the war will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he evokes; that German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling world of those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who became his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the coming catastrophe. The only book I can think of that holds comparable promise is Gerald Brenan’s South From Granada, which begins, similarly enough, with the young, bookish Brenan settling down in the south of Spain to read Spinoza. There had been days, I was told, when horsemen on the way to the indoor lists rode in full armour up these steps: lobster-clad riders slipping and clattering as they stooped their ostriche-plumes under a freak doorway, gingerly carrying their lances at the trail to keep their bright paint that spiraled them unchipped. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but was also invited by gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe.

A documentary film on the Cretan resistance The 11th Day (2003) contains extensive interview segments with Leigh Fermor recounting his service in the S. One of the most romantic books of the twentieth century, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of a long walk across Europe is also a literary treasure, a rich blend of action and observation. The 18-year-old Fermor began by sleeping in barns but, after meeting some landowners early on, got occasional introductions to castles. Our special anniversary Slightly Foxed 2024 Wall Calendar is here, featuring a selection of readers’ favourite Slightly Foxed cover artwork from the past 20 years. Recorded especially for Adventures for Harriet: a 600-mile literary pilgrimage across Europe by foot.

The archway at the top of these shallow steps, avoiding the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee, deviated in two round-topped lobes on either side with a right-angeled central cleft slashed deep between the cusps. His love of strange words and foreign phrases fits equally well with this wont—the verbal flavor of an unusual term more important to him than its ability to communicate meaning. Published by John Murray when the author was 62, it is a memoir of the first part of Fermor's journey on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933/34. Aside from illustrating his penchant for refined obscurity, the bit about the horseman with lances in full armor exemplifies another irksome quality of Leigh Fermor: his romanticism.