After his famous walk across Europe - recounted in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania and fought in Greece and Crete - living disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years organising resistance activities. He was awarded the DSO and CBE, and a knighthood in the 2004 new Year Honours List. His writing career, spanning over fifty years, includes six other titles available in John Murray paperback. He lives in Greece, in a house he designed and built.
Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century - Financial Times A masterpiece softened by warm, human understanding - Sunday Times Marvellous... we are fortunate to have these unforgettable reports from the fields and the marshes, the peaks and the chasms, the taverns and the waterfronts of the Roumeli - Observer A wandering scholar but with a difference: unlike the celebrated travellers of the past he has become part of the country he describes - Sunday Times He is in the first flight of writers on Greece - The Times John Murray is doing the decent thing and reissuing all of Leigh Fermor's main books ... But what else would you expect from a publisher whose commitment to geography is such that for more than two centuries it has widened our understanding of the world? - Geographical Magazine Bringing the landscape alive as no other writer can, he uses his profound and eclectic understanding of cultures and peoples ... to paint vivid pictures - nobody has illuminated the geography of Europe better - Geographical Magazine Extraordinarily engaging . . . thanks to Leigh Fermor's ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase . . . a compelling story - London Review of Books