Patrick Leigh Fermor

Literary fun and games

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Academic jargon, back-scratching and literary scandals were all ripe for treatment in the long-running N.B. by J.C. column – now available in a glorious miscellany

How to tether your camel and other useful tips

29 October 2022 9:00 am

Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too,…

Learning to listen: Sarah Sands goes in search of spirituality

27 March 2021 9:00 am

It was the 13th-century wall of a ruined Cistercian nunnery at the far end of her garden in Norfolk that…

‘The Artist’s Wife Reading’ by Albert Bartholomé, 1883. From Books Do Furnish a Painting

Couldn’t artists let one read when sitting for them?

1 December 2018 9:00 am

The 20th-century painter Balthus once suggested that the author of a book about him began with the words: ‘Balthus is…

Patrick Leigh Fermor as a major in the parachute regiment, October 1945

Patrick Leigh Fermor and the long, daft tradition of Brits trying to save Greece

31 May 2014 9:00 am

Twenty-odd years ago, while on holiday in the deep Mani at the foot of the Peloponnese, I got into conversation…

Go east – the people get nicer, even if their dogs get nastier

12 April 2014 9:00 am

When Nick Hunt first read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful trudge across Europe in A Time of Gifts…

Finally, a celebrity memoir worth reading

4 January 2014 9:00 am

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled…

James Bond, author

14 December 2013 9:00 am

Matthew Woodcock reminds us that 007 was a man of letters too

Charles Moore’s notes: Liberal-leaning Muslims are the people most opposed to the niqab

21 September 2013 9:00 am

We are not allowed to know any details about the Muslim woman, charged with intimidating a witness, who has been…

Bran Castle — but don’t mention Dracula

Transylvania Diary by Thomas W. Hodgkinson - diary

21 September 2013 9:00 am

Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…