Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor was expelled from school at 16 for holding the hand of a greengrocer's daughter, and this event — by concentrating his considerable energy outside the formal educational system — may have been the making of him as a writer.

In December 1933, aged 18, he set out from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople. He had £1 in his pocket, a rucksack, and The Oxford Book of English Verse. He spent a year and a half walking through a Europe that was about to destroy itself — staying in monasteries, manor houses, barns, and occasionally proper hotels, learning German and Greek along the way, dancing in village squares and drinking in student taverns.

He reached Constantinople, then spent several years in Greece and the Greek islands before the Second World War redirected him toward irregular warfare — he spent three years in Crete leading Cretan resistance to the German occupation, and in 1944 kidnapped a German general and marched him across the mountains to a waiting submarine.

He began writing about the 1933 walk in the 1950s but didn't finish the first volume until 1977. A Time of Gifts covers the journey from the Hook of Holland to the Danube; Between the Woods and the Water (1986) takes it to the Iron Gates on the Romanian-Yugoslav border. The third volume, from the Iron Gates to Constantinople, was unfinished at his death and published posthumously as The Broken Road (2013).

The prose is unlike anything else in English travel writing — baroque, allusive, drunk on history and language and sensory pleasure, written with the knowledge of what happened to the world he was describing.