Simon Fenwick | Joan: The Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor

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A talented photographer, Joan Leigh Fermor defied the social conventions of her times. She featured regularly in the gossip columns, not only for her affairs and her fashionable clothes, but for her intrepid travels to Russia and America.

In 1944 in Cairo, she met Paddy Leigh Fermor, lionized for his daring kidnap of the Nazi General Kreipe in Crete. In this compelling portrait of a marriage and a milieu, Simon Fenwick reveals the sexual and intellectual mores of that wartime generation who lived life at full tilt, no matter what the consequences.

‘In this engrossing biography, the woman hitherto overshadowed by her husband is brought from black-and-white to full colour’ Observer

Fermor, Patrick Leigh

Off All the Standard Maps

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli

The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers. I went with that indispensable aid to travel, an aunt, and with the idea that I knew...

A Great Adventure

Andy Merrills on Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water

In late December 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot for Constantinople (as he anachronistically termed it). Recently expelled from school for the unpardonable crime of holding hands with a...