Like Byron, he treats the cathedrals, castles, and local history solely as food for his imagination. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. 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). Leigh Fermor opened his home in Kardamyli to the local villagers on his saint's day, which was 8 November, the feast of Michael (he had assumed the name Michael while fighting with the Greek resistance). To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.

He was later expelled from The King's School, Canterbury after he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer's daughter.It’s wide-ranging, packed with literary allusions (Shakespeare, Skelton, PG Wodehouse) and artistic observations. Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but it is also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that – despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers and grand cities – was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change. One of the most romantic books of the twentieth century, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of a long walk across Europe is also a literary treasure, a rich blend of action and observation.

A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary. His brows went up and he signalled to me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. Gulls mewed and wheeled overhead and dipped into the lamplight, scattering their small footprints on the muffied cobblestones and settled in the rigging of the anchored boats in little explosions of snow. In 1950 Leigh Fermor published his first book, The Traveller's Tree, about his post-war travels in the Caribbean, which won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career.second-hand and antiquarian booksellers of 84, Charing Cross Road, received an enquiry from a Miss Helene Hanff of New York City. The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers.