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“... Where are you off to? Sit down.’ One of the two cheerful old men, who were smoking crosslegged under the branches, patted the ground beside him. Silvery vistas of gnarled and half-hollow olive trees opened fanwise all round them and there was a cicada grinding and scraping on every branch. A donkey under a wooden saddle grazed a little way off, trailing his long rope through the stubble ...”

“... seen from a marginal comment scrawled by a racist reader in a copy of the first (1966) edition of Patrick LeighFermor’s Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece held by the Cambridge University Library. Where Leigh Fermor refers to the modern Greek language as being the ...”

“... ended with ‘To be continued’. The second with ‘To be concluded’. But the third book of Patrick LeighFermor’s famous walk from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’ was never completed. He died two years ago, rewriting and correcting and adding and tweaking almost to the end. The manuscript, some ...”

“... the outposts of empire, more like the British in India than like the magnates who entertained Patrick Leigh-Fermor when he passed through the Balkans. There was Italian blood on the father’s side and Romanian-Greek and Irish on the mother’s. Rezzori is very much concerned with blood and racial inheritance in ...”

“... Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick LeighFermor set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He was 19, an engaging lad, especially attractive to aristocrats who lived in castles and had similarly disposed friends further along the way. His ...”

“... included some of the best and most popular authors of their day, from Byron and Walter Scott to Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Freya Stark. It was Murray’s reputation for solid, conservative values that led both the geologist Charles Lyell and then Darwin to publish their potentially disruptive theories under its ...”

“... with irrepressible Mitford brio. There’s a high-spirited acknowledgment of help received from Patrick Leigh-Fermor (easily the best of her correspondents) in removing from her MS such campus jargon as ‘on-going’, ‘explicate’ and ‘comedic scenarios’. I only wish he had cut out ‘long-remembered’ and ...”

“... Borrow, who captivated Victorian readers with his tales of Spain and Wales. In our own time, Patrick LeighFermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Macfarlane is a member of this group of ...”

“... the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick LeighFermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial ...”

“... lines which caused Mark Boxer to be sent down from Cambridge. Well-matched to their subjects are Patrick LeighFermor on Lawrence Durrell (‘He put new oxygen into the air; nothing seemed impossible’) and James Lees-Milne on the last of the Sitwell gang of three (who else but Sir Sacheverell has ever been made ...”

“... when this volume begins, Betjeman was feeling the anxiety of the ageing writer, well expressed by Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of his from wartime Dublin: Give us another poem, he said Or they will think your muse is dead; Another middle-aged departure Of Apollo from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with ...”

“... than she gave. She spent a week in a nursing-home because she’d been drinking too much; and told Patrick LeighFermor that Diana Cooper had rung her there ‘and said, “Hear you’re in a home for inebriates”: she then came along, seduced all and sundry and left after booking a bed to die in; my prestige much ...”

“... family lived in Budapest and summered on the family estates in the southern Carpathians – which Patrick LeighFermor has called ‘the most resented frontier in Europe’. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the onset of political and racial turmoil, the Goldfinger family moved to Vienna. In ...”

“... civil war, but society was lively. Among his compatriots were Osbert Lancaster, Rex Warner and Patrick LeighFermor. Maurice Cardiff, the army officer who ran the council temporarily before Runciman arrived, recalls him vividly dealing with his improbable staff as they all gamely muddled through. ‘He had two kinds ...”

“... and she has an aphoristic way of concentrating layers of meaning into her sentences, which, as Patrick Leigh-Fermor has remarked, ‘always fall on their feet with a light, spontaneous and unfaltering aptness’. Gertrude’s wealth insulated her from vulgar professionalism: had she been born poor, or a generation ...”