In 2009, Patrick Leigh Fermor's Spanish-language translator, Dolores Payás, visited her subject for the first time in his house in Greece. Out of this first encounter came a friendship that lasted until the writer's death two years later. This charming account was born of those hours spent in his company, a highly personal and moving depiction of the legendary adventurer and man of letters during his final years, surrounded by his drinks, his guests...

Draws on six volumes of unpublished memoirs to chronicle the life of Lady Anne Barnard, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poet and painter, who lived on her own terms and defied the conventions of her day.