There’s no better way to celebrate and honor Patrick Leigh Fermor’s long life and vibrant personality than to dive into his books. Start with A Time of Gifts, the first leg of his lifelong journey, or In Tearing Haste, the collection of his correspondence with Deborah Mitford. And then don’t stop. When you’re done, you can read  W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight, an account of the time the author and Fermor kidnapped a German general.

And then raise a glass in Fermor’s name, remembering what he told Anthony Lane back in 2006: “My dear boy, I have a bottle of red wine and a copy of Persuasion. What more could I possibly need?”

Rest in peace, traveler. 

nyrbclassics:

“To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp—or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth! All of a sudden, this was not merely the…