Paddy on the rocks, photographed in Greece by his lover Marie-Blanche Cantacuzène, known as ‘Balasha’. This picture was taken in 1936 or 1937, when he was twenty-one or twenty-two and she was in her late thirties.
Balasha Cantacuzène, probably in the 1930s.
A moustachioed Paddy takes a quiet moment in German-occupied Crete. This snap was taken only a few days before the abduction of General Kreipe.
Paddy on horseback in Guatemala, 1948.
Joan Rayner, later Joan Leigh Fermor, photographed at Epidaurus in 1946.
Paddy could rarely resist the temptation to sing or join a dance. This photograph was probably taken in Crete, after the war.
A lunch at the Vasilenas Taverna in Piraeus, 1954. Facing the camera is Stephen Spender; opposite him, smoking a cigar, is the ‘Colossus’ of Greek letters, George Katsimbalis; further back, wearing spectacles, is the painter Nikos (‘Niko’) Hadjikyriakos-Ghika. Between Ghika and Paddy is Natasha Spender.
Paddy enjoying himself in Greece.
Paddy examines a relief at his friend Aymer Maxwell’s house on Evia.
Relaxing at Niko Ghika’s house on Hydra, 1955. Paddy and Joan lived there for almost two years in the early 1950s.
The Ghika house on Hydra, later destroyed by fire.
Paddy examining the manuscript of his book Mani, 1955.
Paddy aboard a boat off Hydra, 1959.
Paddy’s lover Enrica ‘Ricki’ Huston. This photograph was taken at her house in Ireland in 1958, after she had met Paddy but before they began an affair.
A cruise aboard Stavros Niarchos’s second-best yacht, Eros II, in 1955. Sitting in the stern are (left to right) an unidentified man in white; Joan; the foreign correspondent Frank Giles; Paddy; Lady Diana Cooper; Anne Norwich; and (head cut off) Lady Katherine ‘Kitty’ Giles. A crew member stands in the foreground. The photograph was taken by Diana’s son, John Julius Norwich. Note the Jolly Roger.
‘I liked Maurice very much, which makes the whole thing even gloomier,’ Paddy wrote mournfully, after reading two vicious poems Bowra had written about him, ‘The Wounded Gigolo’ and ‘On the Coast of Terra Fermor’.
Paddy’s pal Alexander ‘Xan’ Fielding, probably in the 1940s.
Paddy and Joan lived in tents during the summer months while their house at Kardamyli in the Mani was under construction. This photograph was taken in 1964.
For several years the building work was a repeated distraction from writing.
Paddy, Joan, Barbara and Niko Ghika and several of the builders on the terrace of the house at Kardamyli, 1967.
The house at Kardamyli under construction, mid-1960s.
Paddy and Joan relaxing on one of the terraces at Kardamyli.
Paddy and ‘Debo’, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, close friends and correspondents for more than half a century. This photograph was taken during the celebrations for their book In Tearing Haste, published in 2008.
Paddy inscribes a book at Kardamyli, 2008.