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A review by nwhyte
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper
4.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2844587.html
I really knew Patrick Leigh Fermor only for his teenage odyssey; I had forgotten, if I had ever known, that he was a very well-known travel writer already before A Time of Gifts was published, winning awards for his accounts of the Caribbean and Greece. This all came after an extraordinary incident in the war, immortalised in the film Ill Met By Moonlight, where he mastermninded and carried out, at huge personal risk, the kidnapping of the German general in charge of the occupation of Crete. He swam the Hellespont at the age of 69.
Cooper is the daughter of John Julius Norwich and grand-daughter of Lady Diana Cooper, who were close friends of Leigh Fermor's, but she maintains a critical distance from her subject - notably, his inability to take orders which meant that he never successfully worked for anyone else (apart from his military career, though even that was constant chafing with authority) and his complex love life, which eventually settled down into a long-term open relationship with Joan Monsell, who he finally married after more than twenty years together. He seems to have been very happy, and generally charming (though there is a horrendous account of a disastrous set of exchanges with Somerset Maugham, in which Leigh Fermor was clearly at fault), and lived doing the things that he loved doing, leaving the world generally a better place for his existence.
I really knew Patrick Leigh Fermor only for his teenage odyssey; I had forgotten, if I had ever known, that he was a very well-known travel writer already before A Time of Gifts was published, winning awards for his accounts of the Caribbean and Greece. This all came after an extraordinary incident in the war, immortalised in the film Ill Met By Moonlight, where he mastermninded and carried out, at huge personal risk, the kidnapping of the German general in charge of the occupation of Crete. He swam the Hellespont at the age of 69.
Cooper is the daughter of John Julius Norwich and grand-daughter of Lady Diana Cooper, who were close friends of Leigh Fermor's, but she maintains a critical distance from her subject - notably, his inability to take orders which meant that he never successfully worked for anyone else (apart from his military career, though even that was constant chafing with authority) and his complex love life, which eventually settled down into a long-term open relationship with Joan Monsell, who he finally married after more than twenty years together. He seems to have been very happy, and generally charming (though there is a horrendous account of a disastrous set of exchanges with Somerset Maugham, in which Leigh Fermor was clearly at fault), and lived doing the things that he loved doing, leaving the world generally a better place for his existence.