The outstanding achievement in literary biography this year was Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor (Murray £25). Like Dickens (whose life as told by Claire Tomalin was a highlight of 2011), Paddy Leigh Fermor lived life to the limit. Before he was 30, he had not only walked from London to Constantinople, but had fallen in love with a Romanian princess and, famously, abducted a German general in the battle for Crete. Leigh Fermor is a colourful and romantic proposition, but how do you write about a man who has already been mythologised in bestsellers such as Ill Met By Moonlight? Cooper's answer is to find the man behind the myth in a sharp, absorbing portrait of the scholar-gypsy. I was particularly grateful for the news that, until well into old age, Leigh Fermor was able to translate PG Wodehouse ("The Great Sermon Handicap") into classical Greek.

For Leigh Fermor, literature was one strand in a colourful braid of experience. For the late David Foster Wallace, it was life (and death) itself. But both loved Wodehouse, apparently. DT Max's painful and painstaking biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (Granta £20), of the cult American writer of the 1990s reports that the author of Infinite Jest had a dog named Jeeves. Eventually, perhaps, there will be a less dazzled portrait of DFW (as he was known). For the moment, Max has made the indispensable first sketch.

Moving on to memoir, the big beast in this year's catalogue is Jack Straw's tale of "a political survivor", Last Man Standing (Macmillan £20). The former foreign secretary and lord chancellor is at pains to tell his readers that his memoirs were not ghosted. "I wrote every word of this book," he says, and it shows. This is an acerbic, plain-spoken, often self-mocking account of Straw's progress up the greasy pole. If there was a price to pay for outlasting almost all his New Labour contemporaries, he does not really address it. Last Man Standing gives a full and entertaining account of the generation whose obsessions morphed from CND to WMD.

Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape £25), Salman Rushdie's account of his life during and after the fatwa, reads like a thriller. I came to this literary doorstop with the added frisson that I was a witness at several of the events he describes. Say what you like about Rushdie  predictably, the critics have given him an uneven ride  his account of himself is painfully true, despite the contrivance of adopting a third person identity from the names of his two favourite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. By contrast, as an essay in the troublesome question of "I", but much quieter, and more meditative, Winter Journal (Faber £17.99), Paul Auster's second-person narrative addressed to himself, aka "you", takes up the investigation he began with The Invention of Solitude in the 1980s.

Philip Norman's barnstorming Mick Jagger (Harper Collins £20) is a mash-up of "me", "him", "us" and "them". It's an unauthorised life (Sir Mick is too much of a rock god to co-operate with any independent-minded writer), and is probably the better for being untethered. Norman has ploughed this terrain for much of his career, and brings to his subject both a deep fascination with the ecology of rock'n'roll plus a sharp eye for its absurdities.

Where Jagger has prowled the jungle of Hello! and Hollywood like a predator, Rupert Everett has survived, sort of, with an odd combination of sharp teeth, bright eyes, and amazing plumage. Five years ago, he published Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, a deliciously irreverent account of his adventures in La-La land, one of the best recent theatrical memoirs. Now, he's done it again. At the outset, Vanished Years (Little Brown £20) might have a secret ambition to be sadder and wiser, but Everett's eye for hilarious detail turns any elegy into a riot.

I have saved the best for last, Country Girl (Faber £20), the memoir that Edna O'Brien says "I swore I would never write", begun in her 78th year. As a Celt, O'Brien holds a secret communion with the mystery of things. She believes she "saw things before I actually saw them"  ie that her words were always within her. Certainly, hers is one of the most natural and lyrical voices to have come out of Ireland. Her literary DNA is both magical and forensic. No one can nail a scene, or a character, with quite the same perfect brevity. She has lived many lives and known many loves (including Robert Mitchum), but unlike Everett she wants to celebrate and cherish her experience. But this is not a saccharine read. It's a book to crack open on the first day of Christmas, the ideal gift.

The outstanding achievement in literary biography this year was Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor (Murray £25). Like Dickens (whose life as told by Claire Tomalin was a highlight of 2011), Paddy Leigh Fermor lived life to the limit. Before he was 30, he had not only walked from London to Constantinople, but had fallen in love with a Romanian princess and, famously, abducted a German general in the battle for Crete. Leigh Fermor is a colourful and romantic proposition, but how do you write about a man who has already been mythologised in bestsellers such as Ill Met By Moonlight? Cooper's answer is to find the man behind the myth in a sharp, absorbing portrait of the scholar-gypsy. I was particularly grateful for the news that, until well into old age, Leigh Fermor was able to translate PG Wodehouse ("The Great Sermon Handicap") into classical Greek.

For Leigh Fermor, literature was one strand in a colourful braid of experience. For the late David Foster Wallace, it was life (and death) itself. But both loved Wodehouse, apparently. DT Max's painful and painstaking biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (Granta £20), of the cult American writer of the 1990s reports that the author of Infinite Jest had a dog named Jeeves. Eventually, perhaps, there will be a less dazzled portrait of DFW (as he was known). For the moment, Max has made the indispensable first sketch.

Moving on to memoir, the big beast in this year's catalogue is Jack Straw's tale of "a political survivor", Last Man Standing (Macmillan £20). The former foreign secretary and lord chancellor is at pains to tell his readers that his memoirs were not ghosted. "I wrote every word of this book," he says, and it shows. This is an acerbic, plain-spoken, often self-mocking account of Straw's progress up the greasy pole. If there was a price to pay for outlasting almost all his New Labour contemporaries, he does not really address it. Last Man Standing gives a full and entertaining account of the generation whose obsessions morphed from CND to WMD.

Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape £25), Salman Rushdie's account of his life during and after the fatwa, reads like a thriller. I came to this literary doorstop with the added frisson that I was a witness at several of the events he describes. Say what you like about Rushdie  predictably, the critics have given him an uneven ride  his account of himself is painfully true, despite the contrivance of adopting a third person identity from the names of his two favourite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. By contrast, as an essay in the troublesome question of "I", but much quieter, and more meditative, Winter Journal (Faber £17.99), Paul Auster's second-person narrative addressed to himself, aka "you", takes up the investigation he began with The Invention of Solitude in the 1980s.

Philip Norman's barnstorming Mick Jagger (Harper Collins £20) is a mash-up of "me", "him", "us" and "them". It's an unauthorised life (Sir Mick is too much of a rock god to co-operate with any independent-minded writer), and is probably the better for being untethered. Norman has ploughed this terrain for much of his career, and brings to his subject both a deep fascination with the ecology of rock'n'roll plus a sharp eye for its absurdities.

Where Jagger has prowled the jungle of Hello! and Hollywood like a predator, Rupert Everett has survived, sort of, with an odd combination of sharp teeth, bright eyes, and amazing plumage. Five years ago, he published Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, a deliciously irreverent account of his adventures in La-La land, one of the best recent theatrical memoirs. Now, he's done it again. At the outset, Vanished Years (Little Brown £20) might have a secret ambition to be sadder and wiser, but Everett's eye for hilarious detail turns any elegy into a riot.

I have saved the best for last, Country Girl (Faber £20), the memoir that Edna O'Brien says "I swore I would never write", begun in her 78th year. As a Celt, O'Brien holds a secret communion with the mystery of things. She believes she "saw things before I actually saw them"  ie that her words were always within her. Certainly, hers is one of the most natural and lyrical voices to have come out of Ireland. Her literary DNA is both magical and forensic. No one can nail a scene, or a character, with quite the same perfect brevity. She has lived many lives and known many loves (including Robert Mitchum), but unlike Everett she wants to celebrate and cherish her experience. But this is not a saccharine read. It's a book to crack open on the first day of Christmas, the ideal gift.

Traveller and writer Paddy Leigh Fermor is best known for two events. In 1933, at the age of 18, he set off with a little money and a lot of nerve to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Eleven years later, with an equal amount of nerve, he led a commando group to occupied Crete to kidnap General Kreipe, the local Nazi commander. From these two events sprang the subjects and passions for his work and his life, the subject of Artemis Cooper's new biography.

Fermor is a seriously challenging subject for any biographer, perhaps more so for Cooper, who knew him from a very early age. She was contracted to write the book in the 1990s but on the condition it did not appear before his death, perhaps wanting to spare his wife, friends and self the stories of his sexual adventures. Given his wine and cigarette intake, Cooper would have been forgiven for thinking he wouldn't last as long as he did: he died last year at the age of 96. But not even close acquaintance with her subject and unrestricted access to his archive and friends will have made it any easier to get around the main obstacle: the man himself.

A school and army reject, Fermor was a self-made man in the most literal sense. He started, in the words of his headmaster, as "a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness". With those and other qualities, he honed his character with the company of extraordinary people and the words of great writers  he had a prodigious memory for prose as well as poetry. However complex his character, it was made more so, from a biographer's point of view, by the fact that he had already written his own version of some of his life. His books contain some of the finest prose writing of the past century and disprove Wilde's maxim that "it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating".

Charm, self-taught knowledge and enthusiasm made up for the lack of a university degree or a private income. His teenage walk across Europe and subsequent romantic sojourn in Baleni, Romania, with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene are proof enough of that. But the difficulty of capturing such an unconventional and glamorous life is made harder by the certainty that Fermor was an unreliable narrator.

He was also an infuriatingly slow writer. Driven by a life-long passion for words yet hampered by anxiety about his abilities, Fermor published eight books over 41 years. The Traveller's Tree describes his postwar journey through the Caribbean; Mani and Roumeli (1958 and 1966) draw on his experiences in Greece, where he would live for much of the latter part of his life. But it is the books that came out of his trans-Europe walk that reveal both the brilliance and the flaws. A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, 44 years after he set out on the journey. Between the Woods and the Water appeared nine years later. Both describe a world of privilege and poverty, communism and the rising tide of Nazism, and end with the unequivocal words, "To be continued". Yet the third volume hung like an albatross around the author's neck. As the years passed, Fermor found it impossible to shape the last part of his story in the way he wanted. Yet Cooper refers to one manuscript written in the 1960s, and a diary, and from these the final volume will be fashioned and published next year.

Fermor's longevity also presents challenges: there is much to record of more than nine decades of travelling, flirting, writing and hard living. Cooper runs through it mostly chronologically, drawing on published work, intimate letters, unpublished notebooks, and letters and interviews with some of the many people who knew and loved him. There are places where she verifies things that might otherwise have seemed a little incredible  some of the hospitality he enjoyed on his Constantinople walk, for instance. There are other places where she shows up inconsistencies. Some were no doubt due to his writing about events from a distant past, but some were deliberate. As Cooper explains it, these came about "partly because he is condensing more than one encounter, and partly out of tact". He was also quite happy to merge details or elaborate in order to make his story work better. Some might feel cheated by the fabricating of non-fiction but Fermor would insist he always remained true to the spirit of the event.

Fermor emerges as a man determined to live on his own terms, if not his own means, and who mostly  and mostly magnificently  succeeded. Always popping off on a journey when he should have been writing about the last one, always ready to party, he was forever chasing beautiful, fascinating or powerful women, even when with his wife, Joan. She was the great facilitator who funded his passion for travel and writing, as well as women, from her trust fund. Cooper shows that he had often had such a character in his life, starting with his earliest memories, during the first world war, when he was left with a Northamptonshire family, including an older girl he thought was his sister, while his mother and real sister returned to India to be with his father. Fermor remembered spending those first years, "said to be such formative ones, more or less as a small farmer's child run wild: they have left a memory of complete and unalloyed bliss". Running wild, as Cooper shows, was one of the things he would do best during the 92 years that followed.

This is not a perfect book. There is too little analysis of man and motives and not enough probing throughout, as though Cooper could still imagine the wild family friend leaning over her shoulder as she wrote. But then Fermor was far from perfect himself. Instead he was funny, learned, sexy, irrepressible, flawed yet much loved, remarkable and, at times, brilliant  not unlike this book. Cooper ends with the words, "it all really happened", although by then I was in no doubt.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Patrick Leigh Fermor's legendary life is that it lasted as long as it did. He died in 2011 at the age of 96, having survived enough assaults on his existence to make Rasputin seem like a quitter. He was car-bombed by communists in Greece, knifed in Bulgaria, and pursued by thousands of Wehrmacht troops across Crete after kidnapping the commander of German forces on the island. Malaria, cancer and traffic accidents failed to claim him.

He was the target of a long-standing Cretan blood vendetta, which did not deter him from returning to the island, though assassins waited with rifles and binoculars outside the villages he visited. He was beaten into a bloody mess by a gang of pink-coated Irish huntsmen after he asked if they buggered their foxes. He smoked 80 cigarettes a day for 30 years, and often set his bed-clothes ablaze after falling asleep with a lit fag in hand. He drank epically, and would "drown hangovers like kittens" in breakfast pints of beer and vodka. As a young SOE agent in Cairo in 1943, the centrepiece of his Christmas lunch was a turkey stuffed with Benzedrine pills; at the age of 69 he swam the Hellespont  and was nearly swept away by the current.

Yes, Leigh Fermor was an insurer's nightmare, an actuary's case-study, and his longevity was preposterous. He might best be imagined as a mixture of Peter Pan, Forrest Gump, James Bond and Thomas Browne. He was elegant as a cat, darkly handsome, unboreable, curious, fearless, fortunate, blessed with a near-eidetic memory, and surely one of the great English prose stylists of his generation.

In 1933, aged 18, he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, passing through a Europe on the brink of calamity. Decades later, he published two books recounting his wander through that enshadowed land, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1985). Both were instant classics, celebrated for their evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the tendrils and curlicues of their language. In between that walk and those books, Paddy (as he was mostly known) was the lover of a Romanian princess, took part in a royalist cavalry charge in Greece, parachuted into occupied Crete to co-ordinate the resistance, spent months in silent retreat in monasteries, became the most famous English Hellenophile since Byron, was played by Dirk Bogarde in a Powell and Pressburger film, and transformed travel writing.

He lived an inspirationally heterodox life that combined adventure and reflection in unique measure. His story has hitherto been known only in parts, and mostly through the refractive prism of his own tellings. At last his biography has been detailed in full, in Artemis Cooper's tender and excellent book. Reading it is an odd experience: there is the melancholy of having one's hero humanised, joined with renewed astonishment at the miracle he made of himself.

For a man who would become a legend, things began inauspiciously. Feral and feckless as a child, Leigh Fermor was expelled from school after school. He was briefly happy at an experimental institution where the few timetabled activities included nude eurhythmics and country dancing. But the school was closed and the problems returned. His father, a geologist in the Raj, despaired of his wild son, and  like many despairing fathers of wild sons  signed him up for Sandhurst. Leigh Fermor reacted by moving to London, donning a lightly worn socialism, and partying hard. Indebted and unfocused, by 1933 he was  as he put it  "slowly and enjoyably disintegrating in a miniature Rake's Progress".

There the story might have ended. But on a rainy evening of "dead-beat, hungover idleness", he was seized with the idea of walking across Europe to the gates of Asia. Carousing had been his rejection of conventional education; walking would be his rejection of carousing. He kitted himself out with puttees, riding breeches and a greatcoat, somehow acquired the rucksack that Robert Byron had carried to Mount Athos, bought a walking stick of ashwood, and set off on what has been called "the longest gap year in history".

Leigh Fermor had from childhood wanted to live "with an intensity that seemed only to exist in books". This had got him into trouble in England; it was his virtue in Europe. Repeatedly he was welcomed by consuls and by counts  an adolescent super-tramp making a "country-house progress" eastwards. He walked across Bavaria in a "fairy-tale winter" of "thick, silent snow", reciting reams of poetry in five languages to himself as he went. He met entomologists, polymaths, political scientists, shepherds and aristocrats. He romped in hayricks with milk-maids, and spent a night singing in a sea-cave with fishermen, "like a flickering firelight scene out of Salvator Rosa". He was given money, transport and hospitality; he gave back charm and ebullience. "What made him so immediately engaging to people," Cooper observes, "was that he shone with joy  The greatest blessing a guest can bring to his host is the right kind of curiosity, and it bubbled out of Paddy like a natural spring."

The diary he kept during that journey reads, in the main, like any teenager's jotting-book: "Bucharest amazing town  Wandered around ages, soaking it in  Lovely town." What a contrast with the published account, written decades later and told in a fabulously ornate style that bristles with finials and is rich with whorls. Here he is, describing a sunset on the Hungarian plains: "The flatness of the Alföld leaves a stage for cloud-events at sunset that are dangerous to describe: levitated armies in deadlock and riderless squadrons descending in slow-motion to smouldering and sulphurous lagoons where barbicans gradually collapse and fleets of burning triremes turn dark before sinking."

This dusk is epic, reflexive, a single sentence that burns itself magnificently down in honour of the day's own inferno. He knows the risks he is taking with his tone (the cloud-events are "dangerous to describe"), but writes with the confidence of a hyperbolist good enough to earn his excess. And how superbly he manages it  the Altdorfer-like invocations of battle, the gradual combustions, the Germanic delay of that last vital verb until, at last, it is reached and the whole slow scene subsides.

Cooper details the evolution of this style: his youthful admiration for Walter Pater and Joris-Karl Huysmans (both lavishly prolix writers, both preoccupied with cultural twilight), his flirtation with high Catholicism and the baroque, and his discovery of the Landsknecht mercenaries of the 16th century, in whose appearance "medieval solidity [was] adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail". "Everything that could fork, ramify, coil, flutter, fold back or thread through itself," wrote Leigh Fermor of the Landsknechts, "suddenly sprang to action." Just such a fondness for involution became the hallmark of his own prose. He at last reached Constantinople on New Year's Eve, 1934. Four more years of scholar-gypsy wandering in Europe followed, until the outbreak of war brought him back to London. He enlisted in the Irish Guards, but was then recruited to the Special Operations Executive. He trained in Palestine at what must have been his ideal school, "where the pupils were taught forgery, gambling, theft and arson". ("The Molotov cocktail lecture and practical went off successfully," reads a diary entry from the time.) Then he was landed on Crete, where with the local partisans he carried out the famous "Kreipe Operation"  kidnapping the German general and exfiltrating him to Cairo. Cooper is outstanding on the highs and lows of his war years: his accidental killing of a Cretan friend, Yanni Tsangarakis, the aura of "dangerous glamour" that he acquired, and the sensitive question of the Kreipe coup's relation to German reprisals.

Cooper also dispenses with several of the many Leigh Fermor myths: he was not, in fact, wealthy; he was "Anglo-Irish" only tenuously; he was subject to "bouts of depression"; and while he could "enchant both men and women", not everyone liked him. Freya Stark described him as "a Hellenistic lesser sea-god of a rather low period", Somerset Maugham as "a middle-class gigolo for upper-class women", and Fermor admitted his own occasional "rhinoceros-hide obtuseness".

The figure who emerges from this outstanding biography is, though, more glorious for the faint tarnish he acquires in its course. His passion for life emerges as a moral force, invigorating and inspiring those around him. His gifts were profuse, and he gave of them without expectation of recompense. What he discovered was that such benevolence prompts the finest forms of reward: love, friendship and loyalty. Shortly before he died, "at a moment when he felt the end was close", he scribbled a message in a biography of Proust. "Love to all and kindness to all friends," it read, "and thank you all for a life of great happiness."

 Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot is published by Hamish Hamilton.