The best history of Greece around. Beautifully written and packed with insights about the culture and the people. I will be dipping into this book for the rest of my life.--Victoria Hislop, The Week His new book - judicious, well-researched and commendably up-to-date - deserves to be the standard general history of modern Greece in English for years to come.-- Financial Times This book explores the history, not of a Greece of romantic or philhellenic imagination, but the reality of the country as it has become today. The empathy it evokes for the survival of modern Greek statehood against a recurring pattern of often existential crisis is all the more compelling, subtle and above all human in its many-sidedness. Beaton's account instantly becomes the single most outstanding treatment of its subject and shows us why - as Lord Palmerston expressed it succinctly for his own times - 'Greece' is an emotional word that still matters to contemporary society.--Professor Robert Holland A wonderfully engaging narrative .

It is a superb achievement and to be recommended to anyone with even the most rudimentary interest--Professor Kevin Featherstone A perceptive analysis of Greece's financial crisis, the embers of which continue to threaten to derail the single currency project of the EU-- Country Life Praise for Byron's War : Indispensable-- Literary Review.