Patrick Leigh Fermor

Hero, historian, traveller & writer

Patrick Leigh Fermor played a suspenseful and successful role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. Later he became famous for his travel literature. With the face of “a hawk with a sense of humor”, cool in a crisis and dangerously capable, he had an admirable capacity for both self-sacrifice and pleasure.

After a “lawless youth” bumping around schools in which he studied classics but from which he never earned a degree, Leigh Fermor became a nomad. Like his 19th century predecessors, he was brilliant at languages and he enjoyed exploring other countries and peoples and slipping quietly "under their skin”. Before he was twenty he had walked across Europe.

But as the Nazi menace grew, the "time of gifts" ended. Known to friends and acquaintances alike as Paddy, Leigh Fermor became a gentleman warrior who parachuted into Crete. His daring brought him to the brink of capture, torture, and death.

A major in Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, in 1944 Leigh Fermor disguised himself and, with several other Cretan and British operatives, kidnapped Major General Karl Kreipe, the German commander, on a dark bend of road. More than a dozen checkpoints and three weeks later, they escaped Crete with their prey. They had brilliantly elevated Cretan morale without bringing down German reprisals.

During these hectic events, he took time for literature, for its “incantatory music” and its “body of accumulated wisdom. . . .His delivery of poetry has a brisk, practical air that makes a sonnet seem as indispensable as a decent suitcase or a pair of binoculars – part of the well-made equipment that a gentleman should be expected to carry” (Anthony Lane,"The Englishman Abroad", May 22, 2006 New Yorker).

After the war, with “a commanding modesty,” and “a perennial fear of boredom”, Leigh Fermor lived half the year in England and half the year in southern Greece with the Englishwoman he loved until she dies. Sometime during those years, he instilled in himself the discipline of writing. Like Xenophon he lived in the Peloponnese, and wrote about this ancient Greece in Mani.

As a writer he has "a virtuoso skill with words, a robust aesthetic passion, an indomitable curiosity. . .and a rapturous historical imagination” (Philip Toynbee, The Observer). As a hero he is dignified, polite, amused, and capable of rising to desperate challenges.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Leigh Fermor returned to the past to describe his journey on foot across Europe in 1933. Two beautiful classics resulted: A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), both reissued by the New York Review of Books.

Earlier Leigh Fermor wrote A Time to Keep Silence, a study of his monastic experience in 1952. Visiting several French monasteries, to find the quiet he needed to finish a book, Leigh Fermor found a doorway into contemplation. A bon vivant, he took pleasure in “the rigor of the regime that the monks espouse and the tranquility that it breeds in their character”.

Leigh Fermor likes to drink whisky and wine. He avoids sin, which he understands, I think, in the old way as “the use of that which should be loved and the love of that which should be used.”

When you contribute to this website,
you support the Best of the Brits.

Join the Circle of Friends »