As 1933 turned to 1934, British writer Patrick Leigh Fermor was passing through Germany at the outset of an ambitious walk across the breadth of Europe. Four decades passed before he wrote about this journey in A Time of Gifts. By then, Leigh Fermor’s reputation as a Second World War hero was well-established, boosted by a 1957 Hollywood movie glorifying his role in the liberation of Crete.

Writing about his much younger self, Leigh Fermor was careful to emphasize his political naivety at the time of his walk, when he had been only 19 years old, fresh out of boarding school, and equipped with only vague left-leaning political views. “This is a long rigamarole,” he wrote, “but it does show how ill-prepared I was for any form of political arguments. In this respect, I might have been sleep-walking.”