Words of Mercury

By Patrick Leigh Fermor

Book Overview

Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 18 when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, a now famous journey described many years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. It was during these early wanderings that he started to pick up languages wherever he went, and where he developed his extraordinary sense of the continuity of history: a quality that deepens the colours of every place he writes about, from the peaks of the Pyrenees to the cell of a Trappist monastery. Anglo-Cretan team that captured the German general Kreipe in 1944. His experiences in wartime Crete sealed the deep affection he had already developed for Greece, a character and customs he celebrates in two books, Mani and Roumeli, and where he has lived for many years. Missolonghi, playing billiards with Lady Wentworth or bicycle polo in Hungary, watching a Voodoo ceremony in Haiti or a snake festival in Italy, Fermor has an infectious enthusiasm and an insatiable curiousity.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0719561051
• ISBN13: 9780719561054
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: John Murray
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 9.5" x 6.5"