In December 1933, at the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe, reaching Constantinople on the last day of 1934. He travelled on into Greece, where in Athens he met Balasha Cantacuzène, with whom he lived – mostly in Rumania – until the outbreak of war. Serving in occupied Crete, he led a successful operation to kidnap a German general, for which he won the DSO. After the war he began writing, and travelled extensively round Greece with Joan Rayner whom he later married. In 2008, he published In Tearing Haste, a collection of letters with Deborah Devonshire. Towards the latter part of his life he wrote two books about his early trans-European odyssey, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He planned a third, The Broken Road, which was published posthumously in 2013.
ADAM SISMAN
Adam Sisman is the author of several biographies, most recently of John le Carré. His Boswell’s Presumptuous Task won the prestigious US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. He is also co-editor of One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper. Adam is an Honorary Fellow of the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.