Kathleen Jowitt's Reviews > Between the Woods and the Water

The second volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his epic journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. In this section he travels through Hungary and Romania. The sheer variety of his experience is delightful: one night, he's sleeping at the country residence of a Hungarian nobleman; another, in a cave. There's a nostalgic flavour to this (he was writing about his experiences in the 1930s, in the 1980s), a sense of a world that can't be visited, which felt particularly appropriate to the present moment. As ever, I enjoyed this particularly for the historical digressions (which showed me yet again how much I don't know) and the lush prose.