Adam Sisman Interviewed by Suzi Feay

Biographer Adam Sisman talks about his second selection of letters written by one of the greatest travel writers of his time, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

The volume contains 155 letters to almost 60 correspondents, many of whom did not feature in Sisman’s first selection, Dashing for the Post. The letters relate a chance meeting with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, a glass of ouzo with Harold Macmillan, encounters with Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson, and drunken celebrations in the Cretan mountains with old resistance friends. Leigh Fermor was an author, scholar and soldier. He played a prominent role behind enemy lines helping the Cretan resistance in World War II and is widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest travel writers.

Sisman is a winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and a biographer of John Le Carré, A J P Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and James Boswell.

Biography & Memoir