The Adventurer
A Newsweek description of travel author Patrick Leigh Fermor. He could be a character in a book. What life has been lived with more élan? At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople—never “Istanbul” to this irrepressible philhellene—a serendipitous, marathon journey immortalized half a century later in the refulgent prose of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water . He has secluded himself silently with Trappist monks, fallen in love and run away with a princess, fought for his country, kidnapped a German general, joined a Greek cavalry charge, and swum the Hellespont. The Financial Times considered Mani , his celebrated travelogue on the southern Peloponnese, and Roumeli , its counterpart on northern Greece, “two of the best travel books of the century.”