More Dashing ― Further Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor

Dashing for the Post, the first selection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor (known to all as 'Paddy'), delighted critics and public alike. Here now is a further selection, More Dashing, offering equal pleasure.

Paddy's exuberant letters exude a zest characteristic of the man. They 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 recognized as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. Now it is evident that his best letters are as good as any in the language. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed. More Dashing will not disappoint.

Adam Sisman is an award-winning writer, author of Boswell's Presumptuous Task, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and biographer of John Le Carre, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He selected and edited Dashing for the Post, an earlier volume of the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and (with Richard Davenport-Hines) One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper. He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Bristol.