Patrick Leigh Fermor
Literary fun and games
Academic jargon, back-scratching and literary scandals were all ripe for treatment in the long-running N.B. by J.C. column – now available in a glorious miscellany
Sail away from the safe harbour
Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too,…
Holiday retreats
It was the 13th-century wall of a ruined Cistercian nunnery at the far end of her garden in Norfolk that…
Couldn’t artists let one read when sitting for them?
The 20th-century painter Balthus once suggested that the author of a book about him began with the words: ‘Balthus is…
Beware of Brits bearing arms
Twenty-odd years ago, while on holiday in the deep Mani at the foot of the Peloponnese, I got into conversation…
An expert castle-squatter
When Nick Hunt first read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful trudge across Europe in A Time of Gifts…
Blazing saddles
Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled…
Bringing Bond to book
Matthew Woodcock reminds us that 007 was a man of letters too
The Spectator’s Notes
We are not allowed to know any details about the Muslim woman, charged with intimidating a witness, who has been…
A Transylvanian notebook
Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…
