“Advice and instruction have always fascinated me, partly because of their pathos—so little is transmitted in any given instance of advice or pedagogy.”

My God, they were all so beautiful,
each parchment trumpeting its cursive praise
of Allah, whose residence m Istanbul

He who finds his business in the slow, 
persistent study of one green stone, 
even a plain one chosen, let us say, 

Read part 1 here and part 2 here. There was an incident dating from this vagabond period—from 1956, to be exact—that I was keen to ask Paddy about. Some weeks earlier I had come across, in a sort of anthology of classic put-downs, an anecdote …

See part 1 here. Already familiar as I was with the main events of Paddy’s military career, I asked him to fill in the gaps. What had he done while in Cairo? “My first leave from Crete, after many months in the mountains, was at the time of the…

It has been said of Ulysses that, were Dublin ever obliterated, the city could be substantially rebuilt by consulting its pages. Along these lines, if all Europe were, God forbid, laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, o…

It has been said of Ulysses that, were Dublin ever obliterated, the city could be substantially rebuilt by consulting its pages. Along these lines, if all Europe were, God forbid, laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.