"In Greece just after the Second World War, Patrick Leigh Fermor was on a lecture tour for the British Council. The lecture was supposed to be on British culture, but he had been persuaded to talk about his wartime exploits on Crete. Leigh Fermor took sips from a large glass as he spoke and when it was nearly finished, he topped it up from a carafe of water. The liquid turned instantly cloudy: he had added water to a nearly empty tumbler of neat ouzo. A roar of appreciation went up from the audience at this impromptu display of leventeia. A quality prized in Greece, leventeia indicates high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, charm, generosity, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything. Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor had leventeia in spades."
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Novelists from EnglandPeople from LondonMilitary leaders from the United KingdomFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureMilitary leaders of World War II
Original Language: English
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Obituary by Artemis Cooper, The Independent, 11 June 2011
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Patrick_Leigh_Fermor
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Patrick Leigh Fermor
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was an English writer, scholar, soldier and polyglot. He played a prominent role in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War, and was widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, on the basis of books such as A Time of Gifts (1977).
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