Jan Morris introducing Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book A Time of Gifts:

Envy is the writer's sin, as everyone knows, but there can be few writers in the English-speaking world who resent Patrick Leigh Fermor's pre-eminence as one of the great prose stylists of our time. He has no rivals so stands beyond envy.
His literary genre is difficult to define. He is generally classified as a travel writer, but he is really infinitely more than that. Certainly he describes the experiences of travel as providing a theme for his literature, but he is also a memoirist, a historian, a connoisseur of art and architecture, a poet, a humorist, a storyteller, a social chronicler, something of a mystic, and one of God's own adventures.