Paddy Leigh Fermor with The British Council, Athens, Corfu, Crete

Maurice Bowra reported that Leigh-Fermor was "a misfit - unfit for office work" at the Council's British Institute in Athens, but Paddy's lecture tour, which took in Corfu and Crete, was a great success. He was good at making contacts and enjoyed his roving brief.

Bowra also wrote two poems about Leigh-Fermor, which only saw the light of day when published by Henry Hardy in the Wadham College Gazette for 2011 (pages 106-112). A few of the less scurrilous lines from The Wounded Gigolo (17 April, 1950) :

"What avails the apt quotation,
What the knowledge of the arts,
What the lore of every nation
Learned from many unpaid tarts?"


See also, The British Council in Corfu, 1946-1955

Episode 4 of the BBC's Book of the Week, Artemis Cooper's biography of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.

BBC IPlayer - not currently available..

In a letter to Lawrence Durrell, of 18 December, 1046, PLF wrote: "I'm leaving in about a fortnight, feeling angry, fed up, and older than the rocks on which I sit......" This sentence was followed by several expletives about his bosses, after the British Council had "let him go". See The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post", p. 22, selected and edited by Adam Sisman (the source of the facsimile letter to Maria Aspioti, above).