Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

Product Information

Everyone has their favourite sections of these extraordinary books, whether they are drinking songs in snow-bound Germany, the majestic descriptions of pre-war Vienna, or the madcap charabanc rides through Transylvania. Clean unmarked copy, very nice, just a hint of wear to the nearly fine jacket, dj now in a new protective mylar sleeve. The Greek inscription is a quotation from Cavafy [32] translatable as "In addition, he was that best of all things, Hellenic". On leaving Cambridge, Pálffy was at a slight loss as to how he might use a degree in Moral Sciences. Can the traveller to the Hungarian capital today hope to find anything left of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Budapest to explore and enjoy?

The latter half of A Broken Road is set in Greece, along with Leigh Fermor’s other travel texts Mani and Roumeli. The conceit which underscores this passage – the image of memory as a library – is a key theme throughout both books. By the time he reached Mitteleuropa proper, Leigh Fermor had become the darling of the fading imperial aristocracy.

For now the time of gifts is gone’ runs the line from Louis MacNeice that provides Leigh Fermor’s first title, and it is this faint melancholy which makes both books so powerful. Equipped with a gift for languages, a love of Byron and a rucksack full of notebooks, in December 1933 Paddy set off on foot to follow the course of the Rhine and the Danube, walking hundreds of miles.

They lived part of the year in a house in an olive grove near Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula, southern Peloponnese, and part of the year in Gloucestershire. This Easter I offer you a selection of photos of Esztergom, some from 1934, and the Audible audiobook of Between the Woods and the Water, to complement that of A Time of Gifts which I posted a couple of weeks back.Count István Pálffy, who has died aged 89, stood as a candidate in the Hungarian parliamentary election in 2018 aged 85. Each of them is tiered with burnished leather bindings and gold and scarlet gleam on the spines of hazel and chestnut and pale vellum. Between The Woods And The Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor, John Murray, 1986, First Edition, First Impression The second book in a series of three books narrating the author's journey on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1993 - 34. To the Old University, perhaps, one of the most ancient and famous in Europe, founded by the great King Charles IV in 1384. Go to position 22 minutes 10 seconds here for the start of the piece (may not be available outside of UK – sorry!

To discover for himself what remained of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, adventure, the mysterious, the unknown, the deeper currents of myth and story that still flow beneath Europe's surface. He was famous for his wartime heroism in occupied Crete, where he lived as a shepherd among the resistance fighters in the mountains and masterminded the daring abduction of the German garrison commander. In 1933, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, and the first stirrings of the Spanish Civil War were felt in Catalonia.

The concerted spin of a score of barley-sugar pillars uphold elliptic galleries where brass combines with polished oak, and obelisks and pineapples alternate on the balustrades. But I drive wedge-shaped salients into oblivion nevertheless and follow them through the recoiling mists with enfilading perspectives of books until bay after bay coheres. Even if we sometimes feel a tinge of envy at the ease with which the young Patrick drifted into this travellers’ inheritance, it is hard to begrudge him it: the same easy charms that won over the inhabitants of central Europe in the 1930s can still delight a reader eighty years later. This mighty conduit between both sides of the city was Leigh Fermor’s daily route to Pest where, once he reached Vörösmarty Square, he often stopped at the capitals most famous Café Gerbeaud.

It was adapted in a film by the same name, directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957 with Leigh Fermor played by Dirk Bogarde. And when not prompted into reverie by the landscapes around him, he turned inward to the rich body of literature that he had committed to memory. In it he describes his experiences in several monasteries, and the profound effect the time spent there had on him.Go north on Úri utca and at its junction with Szenthármoság tér (Trinity Square) you will encounter an object which carries with it immense superstition for students who are about to sit exams: a statue of Field Marshal András von Hadik on horseback. For a giddy chapter, the traveller had careered around Transylvania in a car with his close friend István, and with Angéla, something of a kindred spirit. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander, Major General Heinrich Kreipe.