High life | 21 March 2013

He was a member of a charmed circle of Hellene and Philhellene intellectuals just before and after the second world war, experiencing modern Greece and seeing it as a place rich in beauty and a stimulus to artistic creation. Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose biography by Artemis Cooper I just put away almost in tears — like a magical night with the girl of one’s dreams, I didn’t want it to end, but end it did — was a second Byron in Greek eyes. I found the book unputdownable, as they say in Boise, Idaho, especially the rich descriptions of rambunctious jaunts to tavernas and places I had spent my youth in.

There is always a feeling of imminent loss where Greece is concerned, an anxiety about what is in store, and no one captured it better than the Nobel Prize winner George Seferis — a close friend of Leigh Fermor — when he wrote, ‘By the following dawn/ nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side/ nor the memory that we were once men.’