Patrick Leigh Fermor
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, OBE, DSO was of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by his walk across Europe to Constantinople, he lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago acquiring a deep interest in languages and remote places.
He was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II.
He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire.
He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".
“[Poetry] is a field where England can take on all challengers.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor
“At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor
“All horsepower corrupts.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor
“I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor