Description
Book SynopsisThe second volume of exuberant, lively letters from legendary travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor
The first collection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post, delighted critics and public alike. This second volume, More Dashing, presents a further selection of letters that exude a zest for life and adventure characteristic of the man known to all as Paddy'.
Paddy's exuberant letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a chance conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, when Paddy opens the wrong door, or a glass of ouzo under the pine trees with Harold Macmillan. They describe encounters with such varied figures as Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson, while also relating adventures with the humble: a pick-nick' with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a drunken celebration in the Cretan mountains with his old comrades from the Resistance, most of them simple shepherds and goatherds. Paddy was at ease in any company unfailingly charming, boyish, gentle and fun.
Patrick Leigh Fermor has long been recognised as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed than in his letters, skilfully edited in this collection by Adam Sisman.
Trade ReviewPaddy Leigh Fermor was a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly an equal in his generation ... The letters are flirty, funny, lively and revealing. A few bring to mind his extravagant, generous, witty, meandering style of conversation; others show his magpie mind; the best contain some of the finest descriptive writing he ever committed to paper. Adam Sisman should be congratulated on this feat of literary archaeology and for excavating for Paddy’s fans a last marvellous treasure trove of Leigh Fermor prose -- William Dalrymple
Remarkably, this second volume, again expertly edited by Adam Sisman, contains, if anything, a more varied and colourful selection than the first … No fan will be disappointed -- Hamish Robinson * Oldie *
Wow - one tour de force after another! The best letters are as good as - if not better than - any in the language: Byron's, Walpole's, Henry James's, Freya Stark's. Often I laughed aloud, tears coursing down the cheeks -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', John Julius Norwich
Adam Sisman is a model editor ... Reading these letters is like gobbling down a tray of exotically filled chocolates, with no horrible orange creams to put you off -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', Harry Mount * Literary Review *
Zest, verbal finesse, almost pristine receptivity and a richly informed cultural and historical consciousness make these letters, even when the erosions of time and illness shadow them, irresistibly exhilarating -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post' * Sunday Times *
