Promotional Information

The authorized biography shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, the National Book Awards and the Costa Biography Award.

About the Author

Artemis Cooper is the author of CAIRO IN THE WAR, 1939-1945 and WRITING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, the authorized biography of Elizabeth David. With her husband Antony Beevor she wrote PARIS AFTER THE LIBERATION, 1945-1949. She has edited two collections of letters and WORDS OF MERCURY, a collection of pieces by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Reviews

Artemis Cooper's funny, wise, learned but totally candid biography reveals Leigh Fermor to be an adventurer through and through . . . page-turning - Barnaby Rogerson, IndependentArtemis Cooper's definitive biography draws on many years' encounters with Fermor, and is probably the most important travel-related book of the year - Conde Nast TravellerPatrick Leigh Fermor survived enough assaults on his existence to make Rasputin seem like a quitter . . . He was elegant as a cat, darkly handsome, unboreable, curious, fearless, fortunate, blessed with a near eidetic memory, and is surely one of the great English prose stylists of his generation . . . At last his biography has been detailed in full, in Artemis Cooper's tender and excellent book - Robert MacFarlane, GuardianThis book is a primer for those poor souls yet to encounter his work, and a valuable, decoding manual for the multitude who believe that Leigh Fermor's trilogy about his youthful walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul marks one of the high points of twentieth-century English prose . . . Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover - Allison Pearson, Daily TelegraphXenophilia is as English as Stilton. 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 o