Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was an English writer, scholar, soldier and polyglot.

[1] He played a prominent role in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War,[2] and was widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, on the basis of books such as A Time of Gifts (1977).

[6] Shortly after his birth, his mother and sister left to join his father in India, leaving the infant Patrick in England with a family in Northamptonshire: first in the village of Weedon, and later in nearby Dodford.

[8] He continued learning by reading texts on Greek, Latin, Shakespeare and history, with the intention of entering the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

[10] He set off on 8 December 1933 with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a Loeb volume of Horace's Odes.

[11] Leigh Fermor arrived in Istanbul on 1 January 1935, then continued to travel around Greece, spending a few weeks in Mount Athos.

[2] On learning that Britain had declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 Leigh Fermor immediately left Romania for home and enlisted in the army.

[18][19] During periods of leave, Leigh Fermor spent time at Tara, a villa in Cairo rented by Moss, where the "rowdy household" of SOE officers was presided over by Countess Zofia (Sophie) Tarnowska.

The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote: "Mr Leigh Fermor never loses sight of the fact, not always grasped by superficial visitors, that most of the problems of the West Indies are the direct legacy of the slave trade.

[26] New Zealand writer Maggie Rainey-Smith (staying in the area while researching for her next book) joined in his saint's day celebration in November 2007, and after his death, posted some photographs of the event.

[29] Leigh Fermor influenced a generation of British travel writers, including Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Philip Marsden, Nicholas Crane and Rory Stewart.

[31] Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids and an eyepatch, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life.

For the last few months of his life Leigh Fermor suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece.

[40] The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete in file number HS 5/728.

A repository of many of his letters, books, postcards and other miscellaneous writings can be found within the Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.