“I also confess that I’m a bit curious to learn if I am correct in thinking that heaven will look a lot like Kansas and to see, like others who have gone before me, if I will still be able to vote in Chicago.”

Which reminds me of the Friday night political discussions I had at a local bar with a yellow dog Democrat friend for nearly a decade. He did NOT like jokes about Chicago voter fraud.

Trump didn’t change that basic dynamic. These women don’t “think” any differently and certainly don’t “feel” any differently. They are still immune from facts and logic.

Unless my memory is playing tricks there’s a kind of running gag where he was sent out to do a lecture on Byron in Bucharest and it keeps getting postponed for various reasons as they flee on from pillar to post… Eventually he gets to give it in Cairo — at which point some Gyppo Nationalist mistaking him for someone else more important assassinates him on the podium.

Actually, he went out with cirrhosis of the liver…but indeed, he was quite the character—Marxist spy with all the trimmings (the kind England seemed to excel in producing)—affably cunning and extremely charismatic…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Smith

Apart from the fellow whose British Council lecture kept getting postponed. Been some years since I read these, but seem to recall he went out with a bang.

Must have a look at the Miller thanks.

(I guess the description of their short sojourn in Athens might add something to the descriptions of those others mentioned above…
…And as long as we’re mentioning Greece, there’s always Henry Miller’s rhapsodic masterpiece, “The Colosus of Maroussi”, to reveal the “spiritus loci” (as it were), though the stream of consciousness, with a bit too much of “me! me!”, may be a bit hard going… Still, his love of that country—its beauty, poets, people, spirit, its historo-mythology and topography—is obvious and irresistible…. Aside from that, Canadian poet/novelist Anne Michael’s “Fugitive Pieces” is a seductive evocation. Even Murakami gets into the act, at least partially—if intensively—with “Sputnik Sweetheart”…but then he does get around.)

You are right about Kreipe being lucky. He spent several weeks on the run with Fermor before being picked up off the coast by British navy. I am sure the two of them had many interesting discussions one of which no doubt went along the lines…just cooperate Kreipe and you will sit out the war in Canada and return to Germany some day. His predecessor, Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, known as the Butcher of Crete also was executed by firing squad.