![]() I lived in the hippest part of London and don’t know of a single woman who burned a bra. What about the sexual liberation of the “free love” era and women burning their bras in public? Was that overblown? Then there was the music, a year off, the caves of Matala where a dozen ex-servicemen from Nam all with drug habits camped out, a few bars where you could get smashed on ouzo and retsina for less than a dollar, and Mick Jagger singing, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ on the café’s jukebox. I was unusually restrained, a serious scholar, but even so, I was, and perhaps still am, a natural hippy. Even before Chelsea became hip kids were smoking dope and dropping acid in Hampstead. I lived in north London and my playground was Hampstead Heath. What attracted him to the freewheeling hippie life? Of all the paths that lead to becoming a lawyer, John Burdett chose one of the lesser traveled routes: dropping out of middle-class London life before university to wander across Europe and Morocco on the “hippie trail,” living in the Matala caves on the Greek isle of Crete, hand-carved by lepers a century ago and where folk singer Joni Mitchell once crash-landed and later immortalized in the song “Cary.” ![]() ![]() ![]() Before publishing his breakthrough book Bangkok 8, and five later entries in the series, John Burdett lived a life of novel-worthy plot twists among hippies in Europe, the criminal underclass in London, and the Hong Kong elite. ![]()
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