Abducting a General

Praise

“[Fermor’s] talents certainly are evident in this colorfully rendered tale…Fermor loved adventure, and he recounts this one with heady enthusiasm.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Paddy (as he is known to nearly one and all) left us three years ago, but since then he has been commemorated by majestic obituaries everywhere, a magnificent biography, a reconstructed final volume of his own masterpiece of travel writing, an eager book of travel that follows in his footsteps and a website largely dedicated to his memory. Now we have a book that specifically commemorates him not as an adolescent adventurer, or as a scholar-linguist, or as a gypsy- wanderer, or as a legendary hero, or even as the wonderful writer that he ultimately became, but as a soldier. Not so much as a regimental soldier but as a born guerrilla.” —Jan Morris, Literary Review

“It takes some chutzpah to kidnap a German general—and serious presence of mind to get away with it. Paddy, the Special Operations Executive commander of a group of 11 Cretan andartes, or guerrilla fighters, together with his second-in- command, Captain William Stanley Moss, had excessive stores of both….Abducting a General is the work of a mature man, anxious to pay proper tribute to the Cretans who were the backbone of the resistance and ran by far the greatest risks. His SOE reports, which run to 90 pages here, provide gripping cinematic portraits of
Leigh Fermor the soldier.” —The Spectator