Category Archives: Travel Guides
Crete: The Battle and the Resistance
The Germans expected their airborne attack on Crete in 1941 – a unique event in the history of warfare – to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. They had no idea that the British, using Ultra intercepts, knew their plans and had laid a carefully-planned trap. It should have been the first German
The Hall of a Thousand Columns – Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah
All the best armchair travellers are sceptics. Those of the fourteenth century were no exception: for them, there were lies, damned lies, and Ibn Battutah`s India. Born in 1304, Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law; over the course of the thirty years that followed he visited most of the
In Tearing Haste
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
The Turks Today
Eighty years have passed since Mustafa Kemal Atat?rk founded the Turkish Republic out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and set it on the path of modernisation. He was determined that his country should be accepted as a member of the family of civilised nations. Today Turkey is a rapidly developing country, an emergent
The Greek for Love
The two-line ad in the Sunday Times advertising Villa Parginos in Corfu conjured an image of long afternoons drinking wine on a marble patio shaded by a grape arbour, looking out over an impossibly blue Greek sea. Instead James Chatto and his wife Wendy got a little pink bungalow with linoleum, a buzzing fluorescent light
Through Siberia By Accident
Through Siberia by Accident is Dervla Murphy’s book about a journey that didn’t happen – and what happened instead. Suffering from multiple minor injuries, Murphy found herself stranded thousands of miles from her original destination, Ussuriland in the Russian Far East. Consequently, she spent three months amidst the vastness of Eastern Siberia, travelling by boat
Constantinople 1453-1924
In his history ‘Constantinople – City of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924’, Philip Mansel charts the interaction between the vibrant, cosmopolitan capital and its ruling family. Mansel’s portrait captures the intriguing colour of Constantinople which, for almost five centuries, was the playground of a dramatic and oftentimes depraved dynasty, and a city whose racial and cultural
Traveller`s Tree – Journey through the Caribbean Islands
In this, his first book, Patrick Leigh Fermor recounts his tales of a personal odyssey to the lands of the Traveller`s 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
Three Letters From the Andes
Three Letters From the Andes” is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wonderful and very much personally accurate look at a trip to South America made over forty years ago. In 1971 Fermor accompanied five friends on a remarkable journey into the high Andes of Peru. His adventure took him from Cuzco to Urubamba, on to Puno and
Mani – Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
This is the absorbingly impassioned account of Patrick Leigh Fermor`s travels amongst the remote Greek Mountains, where he explores the history and myths of the local people. Isolated from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygettus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian Seas, this part of Mediterranean Europe
Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece
Patrick Leigh Fermor`s 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 Byron`s slippers. Roumeli is not on modern maps:
A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople – From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube
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
Between the Woods and the Water – On Foot to Constantinople: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates
In 1933, at the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople and the first part of his adventure was detailed in A Time of Gifts.Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume in a trilogy, is the account of the second stage of his
Story of San Michele
This `dream-laden and spooked` (Marina Warner, London Review of Books) story is to many one of the best-loved books of the twentieth century. Munthe spent many years working as a doctor in Southern Italy, labouring unstintingly during typhus, cholera and earthquake disasters. It was during this period that he came across the ruined Tiberian villa
Levant
Levant is a book of cities. It describes Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut when they were windows on the world, escapes from nationality and tradition, centres of wealth, pleasure and freedom. Using unpublished family papers, Philip Mansel describes their colourful, contradictory history, from the beginning of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth
Quest for Kim
This book is for all those who love Kim, that masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy`s recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here retraces Kim`s footsteps across Kipling`s India to see how much of it remains. To
Eight Feet in the Andes
The eight feet belong to Dervla Murphy, her nine-year-old daughter Rachel, and Juana, an elegant mule, who together clambered the length of Peru, from Cajamarca near the border with Ecuador, to Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, over 1300 miles to the south. With only the most basic necessities to sustain them and spending most of
Time To Keep Silence
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
Running for the Hills
When Jenny and Robert fall in love in the late 1960s they decide to build a new future together, away from the city. They escape to an isolated sheep farm nestled on a mountainside. It has no running water but it is beautiful and rugged. Their young sons can roam wild. As their flock struggles,
The Violins of Saint-Jacques – A Tale of the Antilles
`There`s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it`. Arriving in the wilderness of London and in need of lodgings, Dr John Watson finds himself living at 221b Baker Street with one Sherlock Holmes. When
