1. Yes, that’s Jimmy McNulty (or rather, Dominic West) reading Patrick Leigh Fermor. The event was for the inaugural London Library Life in Literature Award, which was awarded to Leigh Fermor. Although McNulty and Leigh Fermor were from very different backgrounds, neither had much problem finding adventures. When I was 17, my history teacher had recommended ‘A Time of Gifts’ as a book that epitomised ‘all that’s great about being 17’. It charts PLF’s walking at that age along the Rhine and the Danube from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’ in the 1930s. It’s a wonderful, romantic odyssey, rose-tinted by forty years of hindsight (he wrote it in 1977) and the sense of Old Europe in its last days before cataclysm. I was so captivated by the book that when the Berlin Wall came down a couple of years later and eastern Europe again opened up to the West, I set off in his footsteps ‘like a tramp, a pilgrim … an errant scholar’. Our experiences could not have been more different. He walked or rode a horse; I hitch-hiked Trabants. He’d sleep in hayricks or find refuge with Carpathian Countesses in antlered halls; I was in my tent or the occasional tower block. The contrast became hilarious but the thrill of being young, broke and at the mercy of strangers was the same. —Dominic West, explaining why he chose A Time of Gifts as his selection for the Give a Book program.

    Yes, that’s Jimmy McNulty (or rather, Dominic West) reading Patrick Leigh Fermor. The event was for the inaugural London Library Life in Literature Award, which was awarded to Leigh Fermor. Although McNulty and Leigh Fermor were from very different backgrounds, neither had much problem finding adventures.

    When I was 17, my history teacher had recommended ‘A Time of Gifts’ as a book that epitomised ‘all that’s great about being 17’. It charts PLF’s walking at that age along the Rhine and the Danube from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’ in the 1930s. It’s a wonderful, romantic odyssey, rose-tinted by forty years of hindsight (he wrote it in 1977) and the sense of Old Europe in its last days before cataclysm.

    I was so captivated by the book that when the Berlin Wall came down a couple of years later and eastern Europe again opened up to the West, I set off in his footsteps ‘like a tramp, a pilgrim … an errant scholar’. Our experiences could not have been more different. He walked or rode a horse; I hitch-hiked Trabants. He’d sleep in hayricks or find refuge with Carpathian Countesses in antlered halls; I was in my tent or the occasional tower block. The contrast became hilarious but the thrill of being young, broke and at the mercy of strangers was the same.

    —Dominic West, explaining why he chose A Time of Gifts as his selection for the Give a Book program.

  2. Patrick Leigh Fermor in Harper’s

    In the November issue of Harper’s magazine, Robert Macfarlane has written an article titled ‘Voyagers: The restless genius of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin.’ Here’s the first two paragraph, referring to the trip that was the basis for Leigh Fermor’s famous travel books: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water:

    In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor woke up in London with a hangover. Instead of going back to sleep, he decided to walk to Constantinople. His plan was to live as a wandering scholar, to sleep by the wayside and share cigarettes with hobos and pilgrims. But being who he was—a well-connected young man with high-wattage charm—he ended up strolling from castle to castle, playing hop-Schloss across Germany, Hungary, and Transylvania, sipping fine wine from crystal goblets and smoking yard-long pipes with archdukes and earls. Leigh Fermor was an aristocratic supertramp, and for a year he dawdled through the doomed world of Mitteleuropa, snatching scenes from a snow globe shortly before it was shattered by war.

    I was eighteen when I read A Time of Gifts (1977), the opening volume of Leigh Fermor’s legendary account of that legendary walk, and it was a book that I first felt in my feet. It made me, as it’s made so many people, want to stride out in search of adventure. The spell it casts comes partly from the air of miracle that attends Leigh Fermor’s journey. He walks with the seven-league boots of youth, fatigue barely registering as whole countries roll beneath his heels. The comforting rhythms of his days—exertion, encounter, rest, food, sleep, da capo—rock the read into a trance. Even Leigh Fermor’s ‘small rucksack,’ described in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) [a rucksack that once belonged to Byron] has near magical properties.

  3. Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire

    Deborah Devonshire, Duchess of Devonshire, has recently released her memoirs Wait for Me! about her life, the famed Mitford sisters, her historic home Chatsworth, and the people she met over the years.

    We published a collection of her correspondence with Patrick Leigh Fermor, titled In Tearing Haste, last year. Here’s an early letter from Debo (as her friends call her) to Paddy, who lived in Greece.

    30 April 1955 Lismore Castle
    Co. Waterford
            Eire
     
    Dear Paddy LF,
    I was v v excited to get your letter with the swimming plan in it. It is a frightfully good plan, but the pestilential thing is that you would find, not me, but Fred Astaire installed in this pleasant residence. However if you could swim a bit further to the right and land in England and then be like an eel & get a bit across the land you can have the freedom of my bath in Derbyshire & I will have the sensible shoes etc ready.
    I would like it like anything, so have a try and I will instruct any salmon around your route to see that you aren’t filleted or menuiered or bleued.

    I heard they set on you at a ball and broke you up, oh it was a shame.
    Is it jolly in Greece? I bet it is.

    Love from,
    Debo

  4. Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915–2011

    “To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp—or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth! All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do. I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year like Lord Durham with a few noughts knocked off, there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!”

    Patrick Leigh Fermor, writing in A Time of Gifts about the genesis of his journey by foot (undertaken when he was 18 years old) from Holland to Constantinople.

    A website about Patrick Leigh Fermor (or Paddy, or PLF) has a roundup of obituary coverage, and has put up a tribute page, on which readers are invited to comment.