Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor was an English writer, scholar, soldier and polyglot. He played a prominent role in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War, and was widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, on the basis of books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once termed him "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene".
Melk Abbey is a Benedictine abbey above the town of Melk, Lower Austria, on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Danube river, adjoining the Wachau valley. The abbey contains the tomb of Saint Coloman of Stockerau and the remains of several members of the House of Babenberg, Austria's first ruling dynasty.
Frederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet, playwright and producer for the BBC. His poetry, which frequently explores themes of introspection, empiricism, and belonging, is considered to be among the greatest of twentieth century literature. Despite being renowned as a member of the Auden Group, he was also an independently successful poet with an influential body of work, which is replete with themes ranging from faith to mortality. His body of work was appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.
Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), released in the USA as Night Ambush, is a film by the British writer-director-producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and the last movie they made together through their production company "The Archers". The film, which stars Dirk Bogarde and features Marius Goring, David Oxley, and Cyril Cusack, is based on the 1950 book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe by W. Stanley Moss, which is an account of events during the author's service on Crete during World War II as an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The title is a quotation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the book features the young agents' capture and evacuation of the German general Heinrich Kreipe.
Between the Woods and the Water is a travel book by British author Patrick Leigh Fermor, the second in a series of three books narrating the author's journey on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933/34.
Grigore Gafencu was a Romanian politician, diplomat and journalist.
Outdoor literature is a literature genre about or involving the outdoors. Outdoor literature encompasses several different subgenres including exploration literature, adventure literature, mountain literature and nature writing. Another subgenre is the guide book, an early example of which was Thomas West's guide to the Lake District published in 1778. The genres can include activities such as exploration, survival, sailing, hiking, mountaineering, whitewater boating, geocaching or kayaking, or writing about nature and the environment. Travel literature is similar to outdoor literature but differs in that it does not always deal with the out-of-doors, but there is a considerable overlap between these genres, in particular with regard to long journeys.
The Mária Valéria Bridge joins Esztergom in Hungary and Štúrovo in Slovakia, across the River Danube. The bridge is some 500 metres in length. It is named after Archduchess Marie Valerie of Austria (1868–1924), the fourth child of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Josef and Elisabeth.
Kevin Andrews was an American philhellene, writer and archaeologist.
The House of Soutzos or Soutsos was a Phanariote family which grew into prominence and power in Constantinople during the last centuries of Ottoman Empire and gave several hospodars to the Danubian Principalities, like Alexandros Soutzos, Michael (I) Drakos Soutzos and Michael (II) Soutzos.
Travellers' Century is a 2008 BBC Television documentary series presented by Benedict Allen that profiles the lives of three influential 20th-century British travel writers.
Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, was an English historian who published under the name C. V. Wedgwood. Specializing in the history of 17th-century England and continental Europe, her biographies and narrative histories are said to have provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works.
Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe is a non-fiction partly-autobiographical book written by W. Stanley Moss, a British soldier, writer and traveller. It describes an operation in Crete during the Second World War to capture German general Heinrich Kreipe. Moss kept a diary during the war years and based his book on it. The 2014 edition includes an introduction by one of Moss's children and an afterword by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Ben Downing is an American writer, editor, and teacher. Specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British social life and literature, he has written essays, articles, and reviews on figures such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Duff Cooper, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Fleming, Wilfred Thesiger, and Patrick Leigh Fermor. His biography of Janet Ross, who for many years was the doyenne of Florence’s Anglo-American colony, was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Joan Elizabeth Eyres Monsell, formerly Rayner was an English photographer and wife of author Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese is a travel book by English author Patrick Leigh Fermor, published in 1958. It covers his journey with his wife Joan and friend Xan Fielding around the Mani peninsula in southern Greece.
A Time to Keep Silence (1953) is a travel book by British author Patrick Leigh Fermor. It describes Fermor's sojourns in monasteries across Europe, and is praised by William Dalrymple as a "sublime masterpiece".
The Broken Road (2013) is a travel book by British author Patrick Leigh Fermor. Published posthumously by John Murray, the book, edited and introduced by his biographer Artemis Cooper and travel writer Colin Thubron, narrates almost all of the final section of the author's journey on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933 and '34.
The Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive is a collection of over 10,000 items of correspondence, literary manuscripts, articles and research papers, diaries, passports, sketches and photographs relating to Sir Patrick 'Paddy' Leigh Fermor, a British author, scholar, veteran, and adventurer. The bulk of the collection, the Papers of Patrick Leigh Fermor, was purchased by the National Library of Scotland (NLS) in 2012 from Fermor's estate, using funds donated by the John R. Murray Charitable Trust, and is housed at the Library's main building on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was made available to the general public in November 2014.
L'Usage du monde is a travel literature book written by the Swiss writer Nicolas Bouvier illustrated by Thierry Vernet and first self-published in 1963 − a decade after the event − at the Librairie Droz. This work tells the story of Bouvier and Vernet's journey from Geneva to the Khyber Pass from June 1953 to December 1954, aboard a small Fiat 500 "Topolino". Over the years and re-editions, the book became in the last decade of 1900 a «masterpiece of French travel literature». In addition to the precise description of his journey, the author places great emphasis on the people he meets and invites the reader to marvel at the world as he strolls and to let himself be “reshaped” by the journey. These same themes will come up in several other works by Bouvier such as Chronique japonaise, Le poisson-scorpion or Journal d'Aran et d'autres lieux . In 2006, Éditions L'Âge d'Homme published, under the title Peindre, écrire chemin faisant ”, the correspondence that Thierry Vernet sent almost daily to his family along this journey.
