In 1933, expelled from school and having nothing better to do, Patrick Leigh Fermor, an 18-year-old Englishman, set off from London determined to walk across Europe from "the hook of Holland" to Istanbul, which, romantically, he always referred to as Constantinople. He wore a pair of hobnailed boots and carried with him a change of clothes, a pocket knife, a flashlight, a notebook, and the Oxford Book of English Verse and Horace's Odes.…
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