In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure, which took him through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary.
Alone, carrying only a rucksack and with a small allowance of only a pound a week, Fermor had planned to sleep rough - to live 'like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar' - but a chance introduction in Bavaria led to comfortable stays in castles, and provided a glimpse of the old Europe of princes and peasants.
Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but it is also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that - despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers and grand cities - was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change.
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011), also known as Paddy Fermor, was an English author, scholar, soldier and polyglot. He was prominent behind the lines in the Cretan resistance in the Second World War, and widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, based on books such as A Time of Gifts (1977).A BBC journalist once termed him "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene".
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