Love letters to foreign lands

Xenophilia is as English as Stilton. Despite a reputation for insularity, no other nation has produced so many writers who have  immersed themselves in other countries. From Borrow to Lawrence, Byron to Auden, the list is impressive. In one of the wonderful letters quoted in this perceptive, haunting and highly readable biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor called living in England ‘like living in the heart of a lettuce. I pine for hot stones and thorns and olive trees and prickly pears.’ In the opinion of his biographer Artemis Cooper he had an ‘entirely European sensibility’. In the house he built in the mountains of Mani in the Peloponnese, between olive groves and the sea, however, he sometimes missed London.

This is a book about the use and operation of charm, written, as Victorians might have said, by One Who Knew Him Well. Artemis Cooper defines his charm as a combination of ‘happiness, excitement, youth, good looks, eagerness to please and an open heart’. She might have added skill with languages and a driving literary and historical curiosity, not always apparent in the works of Norman Douglas, the Italophile travel writer to whom he was sometimes compared. At least ‘eight languages existed in his head in a state of perpetual acrobatics’. His high spirits — he once described himself as being ‘in a coma of happiness’ — and kind-heartedness helped him to understand other countries — to get under their skin — at least as well as more cynical writers.

A casual remark — ‘castles were seldom out of sight’ — expresses one effect of his charm. After 1934, aristocratic acquaintances entertained and housed him as he walked or rode along the Danube, across the Hungarian plain and into the mountains of Transylvania, on the travels described in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.