The first of the three books about Fermor's walk from Holland to Istanbul in the mid 30's, covering the walk through Holland and Germany. It shows the same fascination with the intersection of Roman and Medieval history with the modern world. I think in this book he has a bit more contact with everyday folk compared with the second volume where he seems to spend most of his time with the landed aristocracy that has come down in the world. There is also more of an awareness of politics, social movements and recent history (WW 1) than in the subsequent book, which makes it more grounded and less fanciful.
I have recently also been reading Picketty's huge tome, Capital in the 21st Century, and interestingly, there is a certain intersection of the two books. As he traces the history of capital, Piketty's charts show the huge drop in capital in Europe between the two wars, which wiped out many family fortunes and essentially destroyed what remained of the historical aristocracy. This very class is the one with which he spends so much time, especially in the book dealing with Hungary and Romania. You see this in the character's stories of their youth in Paris and London (pre WW 1, at the height of capital accumulation by the 10%/1%) and their current life at their country estate, much reduced but surrounded by decades, even centuries of accumulated trappings.
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