A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

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Our special anniversary Slightly Foxed 2024 Wall Calendar is here, featuring a selection of readers’ favourite Slightly Foxed cover artwork from the past 20 years. So he experienced life from both sides, and with all the senses, absorbing everything: flora and fauna, art and architecture, geography, clothing, music, foods, religions, languages. He used it in his writing of the book, which also drew on the knowledge he had accumulated in the intervening years.

Sir Max Hastings first met Leigh Fermor in his early twenties: "Across the lunch table of a London club, hearing him swapping anecdotes, in four or five languages, quite effortlessly, without showing off.

Haste and the weather cut short our farewells and our embraces and I sped down the gangway clutching my rucksack and my stick while the others dashed back to the steps—four sodden trouser-legs and two high heels skipping across the puddles—and up them to the waiting taxi; and half a minute later there they were, high over head on the balustrade of the bridge, craning and waving from the cast-iron quatrefoils. The archway at the top of these shallow steps, avoiding the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee, deviated in two round-topped lobes on either side with a right-angeled central cleft slashed deep between the cusps.

In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène ( Bălaşa Cantacuzino), a Romanian Phanariote noblewoman, with whom he fell in love.His brows went up and he signalled to me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. He seems to notice every small, fleeting detail of everything he sees: buildings, cities, people, sunsets, landscapes. Like Byron, he treats the cathedrals, castles, and local history solely as food for his imagination.