Friday, November 6, 2015
The late British author
Sir Patrick Leigh
Fermor (1915-2011) was widely regarded as Britain's greatest living travel
writer during his lifetime. Leigh Fermor played a leading role behind the lines
of the Cretan resistance during World War II. His war
exploits and travel books on Greece made him very popular in Greece, where he
lived for most of the year, in the village of Kardamyli, in southern Peloponnese.
One of the most daring feats in
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s adventurous life was the kidnapping on April 26, 1944 of
General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander in Crete.
A new edition of his Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete (November 2015) with a foreword by irregular-warfare historian Roderick Bailey is now available by New York Review of Books (Penguin Random House).
Abducting a General is Leigh
Fermor’s own account of the story. Written in his inimitable prose, it is a
glorious firsthand account of one of the great exploits of World War II. Also
included in the book are Leigh Fermor’s intelligence reports sent from caves
deep within Crete, which bring the immediacy of SOE operations the peril under which the SOE and
Resistance were operating vividly alive, as well as a guide to the journey that
Kreipe took - from the abandonment of his car to the embarkation site, so that
the modern visitor to Crete can relive this extraordinary trip.
Also published by the New York
Review Books (November 2015): George Psychoundakis: The Cretan
Runner, Translated
by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
See more:
The Patrick Leigh Fermor Society: Books by Patrick Leigh Fermor; On Patrick Leigh Fermor’s
“enviably colorful” life: Artemis Cooper: Patrick Leigh
Fermor, An Adventure;
BBC: Patrick Leigh Fermor: Crossing
Europe and kidnapping a German general; The Guardian / Greece holidays: On the trail of Patrick Leigh Fermor
in Greece.
