More Dashing
Further Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor
Published on 4. October 2018
Book
Hardback
480 pages
978-1-4088-9366-1 (ISBN)
Description
The second volume of exuberant, lively letters from legendary travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor
The first collection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post, delighted critics and public alike. This second volume, More Dashing, presents a further selection of letters that exude a zest for life and adventure characteristic of the man known to all as 'Paddy'.
Paddy's exuberant letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a chance conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, when Paddy opens the wrong door, or a glass of ouzo under the pine trees with Harold Macmillan. They describe encounters with such varied figures as Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson, while also relating adventures with the humble: a 'pick-nick' with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a drunken celebration in the Cretan mountains with his old comrades from the Resistance, most of them simple shepherds and goatherds. Paddy was at ease in any company - unfailingly charming, boyish, gentle and fun.
Patrick Leigh Fermor has long been recognised as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed than in his letters, skilfully edited in this collection by Adam Sisman.
The first collection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post, delighted critics and public alike. This second volume, More Dashing, presents a further selection of letters that exude a zest for life and adventure characteristic of the man known to all as 'Paddy'.
Paddy's exuberant letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a chance conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, when Paddy opens the wrong door, or a glass of ouzo under the pine trees with Harold Macmillan. They describe encounters with such varied figures as Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson, while also relating adventures with the humble: a 'pick-nick' with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a drunken celebration in the Cretan mountains with his old comrades from the Resistance, most of them simple shepherds and goatherds. Paddy was at ease in any company - unfailingly charming, boyish, gentle and fun.
Patrick Leigh Fermor has long been recognised as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed than in his letters, skilfully edited in this collection by Adam Sisman.
Reviews / Votes
Paddy Leigh Fermor was a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly an equal in his generation ... The letters are flirty, funny, lively and revealing. A few bring to mind his extravagant, generous, witty, meandering style of conversation; others show his magpie mind; the best contain some of the finest descriptive writing he ever committed to paper. Adam Sisman should be congratulated on this feat of literary archaeology and for excavating for Paddy's fans a last marvellous treasure trove of Leigh Fermor prose -- William Dalrymple [Patrick Leigh Fermor] could write dozens of long, well-thought-out letters at will. You can see the ease of writing in the letters here: breezy, funny and light * Literary Review * Remarkably, this second volume, again expertly edited by Adam Sisman, contains, if anything, a more varied and colourful selection than the first ... No fan will be disappointed -- Hamish Robinson * Oldie * Wow - one tour de force after another! The best letters are as good as - if not better than - any in the language: Byron's, Walpole's, Henry James's, Freya Stark's. Often I laughed aloud, tears coursing down the cheeks -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', John Julius Norwich Adam Sisman is a model editor ... Reading these letters is like gobbling down a tray of exotically filled chocolates, with no horrible orange creams to put you off -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', Harry Mount * Literary Review * Zest, verbal finesse, almost pristine receptivity and a richly informed cultural and historical consciousness make these letters, even when the erosions of time and illness shadow them, irresistibly exhilarating -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post' * Sunday Times *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Illustrations
B&W illustrations throughout with 2x8 page colour plate section
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 153 mm
Weight
888 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4088-9366-1 (9781408893661)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
10/2018
1st Edition
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
€10.49
Available for download
Persons
Adam Sisman is an award-winning writer, author of Boswell's Presumptuous Task, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and biographer of John Le Carre, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He selected and edited Dashing for the Post, an earlier volume of the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and (with Richard Davenport-Hines) One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper. He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Bristol.