One of those honoured by HM Queen in last month's New Year's Honours List was the British writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, known to his friends as Paddy, who received a knighthood. He's not very well known, especially on the left-hand side of the Atlantic, but he is a Very Big Deal.

Jan Morris, no mean writer himself, says Sir Paddy is "beyond cavil, the greatest of living travel writers", the historian Lord Norwich, better known to readers as John Julius Norwich, says "he writes English as well as anyone alive".

Sir Max Hastings, who has been the editor of both the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, says he is "perhaps the most brilliant conversationalist of his time".

He was also a Second World War hero of considerable stature ? Dirk Bogarde played him in the film, 'Ill Met by Moonlight', which was about his kidnapping of the General commanding German forces in Crete.

Every sentence he has written oozes erudition, yet PLF (as I'm going to call him in this piece, for the sake of convenience) is no scholar ? he was far too wild a child for that. At ten, he was sent to a school for difficult children. He managed to get into King's School in Canterbury but, after a series of misadventures (his housemaster described him as "a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness"), he was thrown out.

Going through the motions of preparation for Sandhurst, he fell into a life of hanging out with what he described as "the remainder, more or less, of the Bright Young People, but ten years and twenty thousand double whiskeys after their heyday".

He decided on a change of scenery ? he would "abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp ? or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth! All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do. I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year like Lord Durham with a few noughts knocked off, there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!"

That's from the introduction to 'A Time of Gifts', one of two books he wrote about his tramp. A third has been promised, but as far as I can make out, has not yet been published. The first covers his walk from England in 1933 to Hungary. Its sequel, 'Between the Woods and the Water', deals with the second stage of the journey, from Hungary to the city he insists on calling Constantinople, mostly known these days as Istanbul.

It would be easy, had PLF been a lesser man, to dismiss his walk as a kind of 'Swallows and Amazons' jape of the kind that might have been serialised in 'Boy's Own Paper', but he wasn't, it wasn't and it wasn't. His was a powerful mind, soaking up facts and languages like a sponge, and 1933 was the year Hitler came to power in Germany.

When the war broke out, five years after he had begun his journey, he was in Moldavia. Back in Britain, he joined the Irish Guards. After two years, he was drafted into the Special Operations Executive, the intelligence group formed by Sir Winston Churchill with the intention to "set Europe ablaze". After fighting the German forces in Greece and the Balkans, he was parachuted into occupied Crete in 1942. There, for the next two-and-a-half years, he hid up in the back of beyond, disguised as a shepherd, while he organised and ran the resistance against the Germans.

The story of his capture of Major General Karl Kreipe is legendary. PLF and his colleague-at-arms, Major "Billy" Moss, disguised themselves as German corporals (something that would have meant certain death if they had been caught). They kidnapped the General in his staff car in Heraklion and drove him out, bluffing their way through no fewer than 14 checkpoints en route. Out in the countryside, they abandoned the car and force-marched the poor man across the island, until they were able to smuggle him out of the country on a Cairo-bound British boat three weeks later.

What made the action so well-known, however, was an incident on the fourth day of their march across Crete. That morning, the General, tired and surely terrified of the band of ragged Greek guerrillas who held him, together with their two British commando leaders, saw a beautiful dawn break behind Mount Ida. Thinking that he was talking to himself, he recited, in Latin, the opening of a Horace ode. PLF picked it up where he left off, still in Latin, and recited the rest of its six stanzas.

There was a long silence, until the general said: "Ach so, Herr Major?" "Ja, Herr General," PLF replied.

He wrote that it was as if "for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before, and things were different between us for the rest of our time together".

That exploit ? the capture, not reciting Horace ? won both Major Moss and PLF Distinguished Service Orders. He wrote about it in his most recent book, 'Words of Mercury' (published last year by John Murray), which is a grab-bag of bits and pieces of his writing.

After the war, PLF travelled farther afield than he had done before, and published a book about the Caribbean, 'The Traveller's Tree', which won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for literature in 1950, and the Kemsley Prize in 1951. 'A Time of Gifts' and 'Between the Woods and the Water' are still reckoned to be his best, though. Ben Downing, writing about PLF in the New Criterion last year, said "When he finishes his trilogy, it will constitute one of the great sequences in modern literature."

This little snippet about a visit to a museum, taken from the section of 'A Time of Gifts' that describes time he spent in Vienna, might give you a little of its flavour: "I had never understood till now how near the Turks had got to taking Vienna. Of the first siege in Tudor times there were few mementoes in the museums. But the evidence of the second, more than a century later, and of the narrow escape of the city, was compellingly laid out. There were quivers and arrows and quarrels and bow-cases and tartar bows; scimitars, khanjars, yatagans, lances, bucklers, drums; helmets damascened and spiked and fitted with arrowy nasal-pieces; the turbans of janissaries, a pasha's tent, cannon and flags and horsetail banners with their bright brass crescents.

"Charles of Lorraine and John Sobiesky caracoled in their gilded frames and the breastplate of R?diger v. Starhemberg, the town's brave defender, gleamed with oiling and burnishing. (When John Sobiesky of Poland met the Emperor on horseback in the fields after the city was saved, the two sovereigns conversed in Latin for want of a common tongue.) There, too, was the mace of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the skull of Kara Mustafa, the Grand Vizier strangled and decapitated at Belgrade by Suleiman's descendant for his failure to take Vienna; and beside it, the executioner's silken bowstring. The great drama had taken place in 1683, eighteen years after the Great Fire of London; but all the corroborative detail, the masses of old maps, the prints and the models of the city, turned it into a real and recent event."

If there were a Nobel Prize awarded for intelligent use of semi-colons, he'd have been the hands-down winner that year. But in case you think that passage was written by a child of 18 or 19 years of age, it has to be said that PLF, while he surely took copious notes on his journey, did not actually get down to writing books about it until 40 years had passed ? 'A Time of Gifts' was first published in 1977.

During his life, PLF developed a great love for Greece, where he now lives. He has written two books about that country, neither of which I have read. One of them, 'Mani', is said to be a great book, the equal of 'A Time of Gifts'.

Greece for me is a blind spot. I haven't been there, and seem to have no desire to go, not matter how much I read about it.

But perhaps this little paragraph, borrowed from something written by Edmund Keeley, thought to be the 20th Century's best translator of Greek poetry, explains what PLF finds so attractive about it: "In the remoter provinces you encounter the kind of landscape closest to that which Seferis identified as essentially Greek, not grand or stately, as one might say of landscapes outside Greece, but 'a whole world: lines that come and go; bodies and features, the tragic silence of a face' ? a perception he finds difficult to put into words but summarizes as 'a kind of process of humanisation' that comes with the Greek light.

"It is a process that extends to legendary figures in the landscape, that bring the grand old men of literary history down to earth and allows the poet to see Aeschylus not as the Titan or Cyclops that some imagine him but as 'a man of feeling' who expresses himself 'close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do'."