There are plenty of adventurous moments that every reader can empathize with... like losing his passport in Munich together with all his belongings. They disappeared from a youth hostel to which he could not return for the night as a result of passing out drunk at the beer festival. But PLF always manages to get out of every scrape with flying colours !

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.After living with her for many years, Leigh Fermor was married in 1968 to the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of Bolton Eyres-Monsell, 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on many travels until her death in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. They had no children. [23] 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. Joan Leigh Fermor". The Independent. 10 June 2003. Archived from the original on 25 May 2022 . Retrieved 11 November 2018. His life and work were profiled by the travel writer Benedict Allen in the documentary series Travellers' Century (2008) on BBC Four Lancers' torsoes taper into their sashes like bobbins. Red and white ribbons cross their breasts and sometimes the Golden Fleece sprouts from those high star-crusted collars. Hands rest on the hilt of a sabre looped with a double-ended sabretache. Others nurse a plumed shako, a dragoon's helmet or an uhlan's czapka with a square top like a mortar-board and tufted with a tall aigrette." [p124] The greatest of living travel writers…an amazingly complex and subtle evocation of a place that is no more.”— Jan Morris

Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait".... Sixteenth century Henri Estienne who first coined this oft-repeated phrase was nicely side-stepped by PLF. Here is an odyssey seen through the eyes of a most intelligent and curious teenager, full of enthusiasm and courage, written up by a man of vast experience half a lifetime later ! No wonder the result is like no other, so amazingly different and distinguished ! The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvelous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth.

Success!

In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and discursive, staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first great excursion… They’re partially about an older author’s encounter with his young self, but they’re mostly an evocation of a lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses and dark forests, of ancient synagogues and vivacious Jewish coffeehouses, of Hussars and Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply eccentric patricians with vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian count who was a famous entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths and who spoke perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent, thanks to his Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s keen eye and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart, besides the utterly engaging persona of their narrator, is his historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage…Few writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever alert to the historical forces that account for the shifts in custom, language, architecture, and costume that he discerns), and I’ve read none who are so sensitive to the layers of invasion that define the part of Europe he depicts here. 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.”— Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic George Elliot both anticipated and perfectly summed up Leigh Fermor in Middlemarch, in the character of Will Ladislaw—another young Englishman with vague literary and artistic ambitions who travels to the continent to bask in the culture: “rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy ‘bits’ from old pictures, leaving off because they were ‘no good,’ and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point.” This description fits Leigh Fermor to a T—the total aimlessness, the nebulous hopes of someday writing a book, the amateurish sketching that Leigh Fermor himself is careful to denigrate. A unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last and the greatest of a generation whose like we won’t see again.”– Geographical A documentary film on the Cretan resistance The 11th Day (2003) contains extensive interview segments with Leigh Fermor recounting his service in the S.O.E. and his activities on Crete, including the capture of General Kreipe.

Undertaking this journey today would be most unwise. To do it in 1933 at the age of 18 seems positively insane. What Fermor saw is now a completely vanished world, of course. Imagine walking across Europe at that young age and in that time, walking across Germany just as the Nazi terror was coming to power, strolling observantly through a wonderful world that was about to vanish forever, in flame and death. The elderly author sees sensitively through the eyes of the young traveler, and the reader is keenly aware of having the benefit of both perspectives. The young Fermor observes the charming folk traditions of the gypsies of Bulgaria, and the reader knows they will all surely be liquidated in the coming fascist occupation. There is a bitterly poignant air that hangs over this trilogy -- of aching beauty, doom and death, love and loss, an irrepressible zest for living overshadowed by the reader’s knowledge of what was about to befall these beautiful countries and these lovely people. Here and there the old man writing up the story may have gilded the lily just a little, or been parsimonious with the exact truth concerning his amorous escapades, but there is something in his writing, the way he can level with the reader, that convinces that every essential in the long-running saga is absolutely true. The second installment is called "Between the Woods and the Water" and was published as recently as 1986. It finished with the 'implacable words' "To Be Concluded". The third installment - not alas to be written up by Paddy himself - is believed to be still in gestation !A word about the title which is a little obscure for a travelogue, however unusual and distinguished. It is taken from a line of poetry by Louis MacNeice and in my understanding honours the people who were so kind and generous to him along the way. One must remember he was not yet nineteen when he first set out and his youth, good looks and sense of humour charmed very nearly all he met and he certainly displayed a supreme ability to get along with just about anybody. The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete in file number HS 5/728. Derek Bond, Steady, Old Man! Don't You Know There's a War On? (1990), London: Leo Cooper, ISBN 0-85052-046-0, p. 19. Leigh Fermor was noted for his strong physical constitution, even though he smoked 80 to 100 cigarettes a day. [29] Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life.