Patrick Leigh Fermor Dies at 96

The Guardian has never published a truer sentence than this, from polymath Patrick Leigh Fermor's obituary today: "A Time of Gifts is not only a great travel book (a term he disliked), but one of the wonders of modern literature."

The magic of the memoir began decades earlier, in 1933 when the 18-year-old Paddy decided not to attend college but instead to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He waited 44 years to write about the first section of the journey, and the second section needed nearly another decade. He is said to have held onto the proofs to that follow-up book Between the Woods and the Water for "several years." Needless to say, he could never relinquish his manuscript covering the final third of his epic journey, but he was seen earlier this year "working on corrections to a finished text" and his biographer Artemis Cooper says, a "draft of the third volume has existed for some time, and will be published in due course." Even if he had never embarked on his long trek, his stellar reputation would rest on his two books about Greece, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece. He and his wife Joan lived in Greece for half a century. Before that he fought with the Crete resistance in the war, spending two years disguised as a shepherd and living in high caves. His valor earned him medals and a dull, flattened-out movie in which he is played by Dirk Bogarde. He was an inspiration to generations of writers, travel writers, and LGBT travel writers, most especially Jan Morris and Bruce Chatwin.

UPDATE: A tribute from Jan Morris.