The tights below, which ended in wide slash-toed duck-bill shoes, were striped and parti-coloured.

They were fluttering criss-cross cages of colour, like maypoles about to unfurl.

From buttocks and cod piece to knees, their legs were subjected to the same contradictory ribbon treatment, and with cunning asymmetry, the bright bands were arranged differently askew on each leg. Slashed doublets expanded their shoulders and quilted sleeves puffed out their arms like Zeppelins but on top of all this, their torsos were wrapped slantwise in wide ribbons, loosely attached to their trunks by a row of bows at an opposite slant, and bright bands fluttered about their already voluminous arms in similar contradictory spirals: scarlet, vermilion, orange, canary Prussian blue, grass green, violet and ochre. Their floppy hats were worn at killing angles, and, under the curl of ostrich feathers, the segmented brims spread as incongruously as the petals of a periwinkle. “Challenging moustachios luxuriated over the jut of their bushy beards. ‘Not only is this journey one of physical adventure but of cultural awakening.Landsknechts in the time of the Emperor Maximilian I Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but it is also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that – despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers and grand cities – was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure, which took him through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary.Īlone, carrying only a rucksack and with a small allowance of only a pound a week, Fermor had planned to sleep rough – to live ‘like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar’ – but a chance introduction in Bavaria led to comfortable stays in castles, and provided a glimpse of the old Europe of princes and peasants. In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his ‘great trudge’, a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul.

‘The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.’ ‘ gloriously ornate account of that epic journey is a classic’ ROBERT MACFARLANE

A time of gifts