Patrick Leigh Fermor

Una auténtica joya en su género. Uno de los grandes libros de viajes del siglo XX. El tiempo de los regalos narra la primera etapa de la aventura emprendida por Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor a finales de 1933, cuando solo tenia dieciocho años, y que lo llevo desde su Londres natal hasta Constantinopla, hoy Estambul, cruzando a pie una Europa milenaria por la que ya empezaba a extenderse la sombra del nazismo. Cuarenta años despues de aquel viaje legendario, Leigh Fermor recuerda y reflexiona, con el prisma de la cultura adquirida, sobre las lenguas, las artes, las religiones, la geografia y la historia que descubrio cuando era un joven inquieto y rebelde, retoño de la clase alta britanica convertido en mochilero. Las paginas de este libro extraordinario hablan de todo cuanto el autor ha atesorado de su periplo por disimiles gentes y paisajes: regalos espirituales que nunca olvido, como tampoco los olvidara el lector.

La odisea que emprendió Patrick Leigh Fermor en 1933 por el corazón de Europa dio pie a una de las sagas más brillantes de la literatura de viajes. Publicado póstumamente, El último tramo cierra la trilogia iniciada con El tiempo de los regalos y Entre los bosques y el agua. Una experiencia literaria y viajera a traves de Rumania, Constantinopla y Grecia.

A finales de 1933, a punto de cumplir diecinueve años, Paddy Leigh Fermor se cargó la mochila a la espalda y emprendió un viaje iniciático que le llevaría desde su Londres natal hasta Estambul, cruzando a pie el corazon de una Europa milenaria por la que entonces empezaba a extenderse la sombra del nazismo. Mas de cuarenta años mas tarde el sexagenario Leigh Fermor quiso plasmar por escrito aquella experiencia unica. Fruto de ese deseo son El tiempo de los regalos y Entre los bosques y el agua, dos magnificos libros en los que plasma diferentes etapas de aquel itinerario. Teñidos de una leve pero inequivoca melancolia y narrados con la sabiduria que dan los años, El tiempo de los regalos y Entre los bosques y el agua son dos excepcionales joyas literarias unicas en su genero.

In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, works now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time.

Un petit avançament d’una altra novetat editorial per a després de l’estiu. En un monestir el temps passa a una velocitat que desconcerta. Llevat de les grans festes religioses i del cicle de les es

In 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on an extraordinary journey by foot - from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. "A Time of Gifts" is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary. It is a book of compelling glimpses - not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world''s grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic. First published to enormous acclaim, it confirmed Fermor''s reputation as the greatest living travel writer, and has, together with its sequel "Between the Woods and the Water" (the third volume is famously yet to be published), been a perennial seller for 25 years.

The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania. The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges. The concluding part of the trilogy was published in September 2013 as The Broken Road.

In this, his first book, Patrick Leigh Fermor recounts his tales of a personal odyssey to the lands of the Travellers Tree - a tall, straight-trunked tree whose sheath-like leaves collect copious amounts of water. He made his way through the long island chain of the West Indies by steamer, aeroplane and sailing ship, noting in his records of the voyage the minute details of daily life, of the natural surroundings and of the idiosyncratic and distinct civilisations he encountered amongst the Caribbean Islands. From the ghostly Ciboneys and the dying Caribs to the religious eccentricities like the Kingston Pocomaniacs and the Poor Whites in the Islands of the Saints, Patrick Leigh Fermor recreates a vivid world, rich and vigorous with life.

Patrick Leigh Fermors Mani compellingly revealed a hidden world of Southern Greece and its past. Its northern counterpart takes the reader among Sarakatsan shepherds, the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, among itinerant pedlars and beggars, and even tracks down at Missolonghi a pair of Byrons slippers.Roumeli is not on modern maps: it is the ancient name for the lands from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth. But it is the perfect, evocative name for the Greece that Fermor captures in writing that carries throughout his trademark vividness of description. But what is more, the pictures of people, traditions and landscapes that he creates on the page are imbued with an intimate understanding of Greece and its history.

From the French Abbey of St Wandrille to the abandoned and awesome Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor studies the rigorous contemplative lives of the monks and the timeless beauty of their monastic surroundings. In his occasional retreats, the peaceful solitude and the calm enchantment of the monasteries was passed on as a kind of supernatural windfall which A Time to Keep Silence so effortlessly records.

In spring 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six legendary Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the Devonshires house in Ireland. This halcyon visit sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of sporadic but highly entertaining letters. There can rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed illiterate (though suspected by her friends of being a secret reader), darts from subject to subject while Paddy, polyglot, widely read prose virtuoso, replies in the fluent, polished manner that has earned him recognition as one of the finest writers in the English language. Prose notwithstanding, the two friends have much in common: a huge enjoyment of life, youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and lack of malice. There are glimpses of President Kennedys inauguration, weekends at Sandringham, stag hunting in France, filming with Errol Flynn in French Equatorial Africa and, above all, of life at Chatsworth, the great house that Debo spent much of her life restoring, and of Paddy in the house that he and his wife Joan designed and built on the southernmost peninsula of Greece.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 18 when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, described many years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.It was during these early wanderings that he started to pick up languages, and where he developed his extraordinary sense of the continuity of history: a quality that deepens the colours of every place he writes about, from the peaks of the Pyrenees to the cell of a Trappist monastery. His experiences in wartime Crete sealed the deep affection he had already developed for Greece, a country whose character and customs he celebrates in two books, Mani and Roumeli, and where he has lived for over forty years. Whether he is drawing portraits in Vienna or sketching Byrons slippers in Missolonghi, the Leigh Fermor touch is unmistakable. Its infectious enthusiasm is driven by an insatiable curiosity and an omnivorous mind - all inspired by a passion for words and language that makes him one of the greatest prose writers of his generation.

INTRODUCED BY JAN MORRIS[This] gloriously ornate account of that epic journey is a classicROBERT MACFARLANEThe feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic. 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. Not only is this journey one of physical adventure but of cultural awakening. Architecture, art, genealogy, quirks of history and language are all devoured -- and here passed on -- with a gusto uniquely his COLIN THUBRON, SUNDAY TIMESOne of the most romantic books of the twentieth century, Patrick Leigh Fermors account of a long walk across Europe is also a literary treasure, a rich blend of action and observationGUARDIAN

The long-awaited final volume of the trilogy by Patrick Leigh Fermor. A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water were the first two volumes in a projected trilogy that would describe the walk that Patrick Leigh Fermor undertook at the age of eighteen from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. When are you going to finish Vol. III? was the cry from his fans; but although he wished he could, the words refused to come. The curious thing was that he had not only written an early draft of the last part of the walk, but that it predated the other two. It remains unfinished but The Broken Road - edited and introduced by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper - completes an extraordinary journey.

This is Patrick Leigh Fermors spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greeces past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europes wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe.Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa. Leigh Fermors hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.

A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road.Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend. The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddys twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance and his tendency to get into scrapes - particularly when drinking and, quite separately, driving. Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byrons slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maughams Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipes abduction; his extensive travels. Some letters contain glimpses of the great and the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.