The dream odyssey of every footloose student”, is what the editors call the tripartite travel book that started with A Time of Gifts in 1977, continued with Between the Woods and the Water in 1986, and is finally concluded here. I suppose it is, or at least was, when, at the age of 18, Paddy Fermor abandoned school and set out to cross western and eastern Europe from the Hook of Holland all the way to Constantinople.And what a boy he appears to be from the opening photograph of this new volume. “I must have been an uncouth spectacle,” reads the caption to the portrait of 19-year-old Fermor posing in front of the Rila monastery in Bulgaria, in autumn 1934. “I blush, now, to set it down, but honesty compels it – a scarlet and yellow braid belt bought in Transyl