Leigh Fermor’s descriptions of pre-war beer halls encompass the quaint, the sinister, the laughable and the grotesque, with first hints of Nazi cheerfulness invading medieval slovenliness, and with near biblical accounts of the sin of gluttony.
‘… pace-forcing black-letter hortations in the beer-halls of the north…’
Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 63
