Patrick Leigh Fermor: 'the finest travel writer of his generation'
This first edition of Between the Woods and the Water, published in 1986, is a travel book by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the second in a series of three in which he narrated his journey on foot across Europe from Holland to Constantinople (as he called it) in 1933 and 1934.
Widely regarded as the finest travel writer of his generation, Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was also a distinguished Second World War soldier, serving undercover in the SOE in Crete where he commanded a number of audacious guerrilla operations against the occupying Nazi forces (his code name was Mihalis).
More than that, he was a translator, raconteur, adventurer, scholar, and all-round gregarious polyglot with a wide circle of friends from all walks of life. For much of their long married life, he and his wife Joan lived in the Greek village of Kalamitsi near Kardamyli in the southern Peloponnese, where their hospitality seemed boundless. He held the military OBE, the Distinguished Service Order, and was knighted in 2004.
Between the Woods and the Water rests upon Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece – a souvenir book from an unforgettable British Museum exhibition in 2018.
♦ While you’re here… I have two Galleries that might interest you: a Bookshops gallery and a Public Libraries gallery. Happy browsing!
Patrick Leigh Fermor: 'the finest travel writer of his generation'
This first edition of Between the Woods and the Water, published in 1986, is a travel book by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the second in a series of three in which he narrated his journey on foot across Europe from Holland to Constantinople (as he called it) in 1933 and 1934.
Widely regarded as the finest travel writer of his generation, Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was also a distinguished Second World War soldier, serving undercover in the SOE in Crete where he commanded a number of audacious guerrilla operations against the occupying Nazi forces (his code name was Mihalis).
More than that, he was a translator, raconteur, adventurer, scholar, and all-round gregarious polyglot with a wide circle of friends from all walks of life. For much of their long married life, he and his wife Joan lived in the Greek village of Kalamitsi near Kardamyli in the southern Peloponnese, where their hospitality seemed boundless. He held the military OBE, the Distinguished Service Order, and was knighted in 2004.
Between the Woods and the Water rests upon Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece – a souvenir book from an unforgettable British Museum exhibition in 2018.
♦ While you’re here… I have two Galleries that might interest you: a Bookshops gallery and a Public Libraries gallery. Happy browsing!