British School at Athens - Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies – serie

The ‘Macedonian question’ has been much studied in recent years as has the political history of the period from the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. But for a variety of reasons, connected with the political division of Greece and the involvement of outside powers, the events at and behind the Macedonian front have been side-lined. The recent commemorations of the centenary of the end of the First World War in the UK illustrate how by comparison with the enormous and moving emphasis on the western front, Macedonia has been not wholly but largely ignored. This volume illuminates this comparatively neglected period of Greek history and examines the strategic and military aspects of the war in Macedonia and the political, social, economic and cultural context of the war.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and with British political influence over Greece soon to be ceded to the United States, there was a considerable degree of cultural interaction between Greek and British literati. Sponsored or assisted by the British Council, this interaction was notable for its diversity and quality alike. Indeed, the British Council in Greece made a more significant contribution to local culture in that period than at any other time, and perhaps in any other country. Many of the participants – among them Patrick Leigh Fermor, Steven Runciman, and Louis MacNeice – are well known, while others deserve to be better known than they are today. But what has been less fully discussed, and what the volume sets out to do, is to explore the two-way relations between Greek and British literary production in which the British Council played a particularly important role until the outbreak of armed conflict in Cyprus in 1955, which rendered further contacts of this kind difficult. Close attention is paid to the variety of ways – marked by personal affinities and allegiances, but also by political tensions – in which the British Council functioned as an agent of interaction in a climate where a complex blend of traditional Anglophilia or Philhellenism found itself encountering a new post-war and Cold War environment. What is distinctive about the volume, beyond the inclusion of much recent archival research, is its attention to the British Council as part of the story of Greek letters, and not just as a place in which various British men and women of letters worked. The British Council found itself, sometimes more through improvisation and personal affinities than through careful planning, at the heart of some key developments, notably in terms of important periodical publications which had a lasting influence on Greek letters. Though in the cultural forum that influence was arguably to be less pervasive than that of France, with its more ambitious cultural outreach, or than that of the USA in later decades, the role of the British Council in Greece in this crucial period of Greek (and indeed European) post-war history continues to make a rich case study in cultural politics. This volume thus fills a gap in the rich bibliography on Anglo-Greek relations and contributes to a wider scholarly and public discussion about cultural politics.

Hellenomania, the second volume in the MANIA series, presents a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary exploration of the modern reception of ancient Greek material culture in cultural practices ranging from literature to architecture, stage and costume design, painting, sculpture, cinema, and the performing arts. It examines both canonical and less familiar responses to both real and imagined Greek antiquities from the seventeenth century to the present, across various national contexts. Encompassing examples from Inigo Jones to the contemporary art exhibition documenta 14, and from Thessaloniki and Delphi to Nashville, the contributions examine attempted reconstructions of an ‘authentic’ ancient Greece alongside imaginative and utopian efforts to revive the Greek spirit using modern technologies, new media, and experimental practices of the body. Also explored are the political resonances of Hellenomaniac fascinations, and tensions within them between the ideal and the real, the past, present, and future. Part I examines the sources and derivations of Hellenomania from the Baroque and pre-Romantic periods to the early twentieth century. While covering more canonical material than the following sections, it also casts spotlights on less familiar figures and sets the scene for the illustrations of successive waves of Hellenomania explored in subsequent chapters. Part II focuses on responses, uses, and appropriations of ancient Greek material culture in the built environment—mostly architecture—but also extends to painting and even gymnastics; it examines in particular how a certain idealisation of ancient Greek architecture affected its modern applications. Part III explores challenges to the idealisation of ancient Greece, through the transformative power of colour, movement, and of reliving the past in the present human body, especially female. Part IV looks at how the fascination with the material culture of ancient Greece can move beyond the obsession with Greece and Greekness.

The ship transcends the descriptive categories of place, vehicle and artefact; it is a cosmos, which requires its own cosmology. This is the subject matter of this volume, which falls within the broader, flourishing sub-field of maritime anthropology. Specifically, the volume first investigates the dialectic between the sea, the ship and the ship-dweller and shows how traits are exchanged between the three. It then focuses on land-dwellers, their understanding of seaborne existence and their invaluable contribution to the culture of ships. It shows that the romanticised views of life at sea that land-dwellers hold constitute an important aspect of the cosmology of ships and they too need to be considered if the polyvalence of ships is to be fully understood. In order for this cosmology to be written, some of the volume’s contributors have travelled on ships and interviewed mariners, fishermen, boat-builders and boat-dwellers; others have traced the courses of ships in poems, films, philosophical texts, and collective myths of genealogy and heritage. Overall the volume shows where ships can go, and how they are perceived and experienced by those living and travelling in them, watching and waiting for them, dreaming and writing about them, and, finally, what literal and metaphorical crews man them.

This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing ’proof’ of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.

This book explores the concept of ‘the Levant’ as a component of the regional and international system during the age of imperialism. At its heart is a focus on the experience of Greek-speaking societies and, above all, the independent state of Greece that came into existence in 1830. A key sub-theme running through the account is the Anglo-Hellenic connection stemming from an enhanced British presence in the Eastern Mediterranean from the 1830s and 1840s, and in particular its relationship to the Greek polity. Within this framework the emergence of the idea of ‘Greater Greece’ is integrated into the narrative, including its regional reverberations and ethnic tensions. Other contributions examine trade and finance, gender issues, colonialism and the distinctive experience of Cyprus. The core of the volume deals centrally with three interlocking themes: modernity, nationalism and trans-nationalism. Ultimately these forces were to prove at odds with the ambiguity and elite structures that characterized the Levant in its nineteenth-century heyday. The book analyses the evolution, and increasing definition from the late 1950s, of Greece’s modern European identity, while taking into account the magnetic force of other relationships and regional links. This treatment connects with the choices and dilemmas facing Greece and its surrounding region, which contemporary crises invariably throw into relief. It will be of interest both to specialised historians and students of current affairs seeking to understand the broader historical context.

Since its rediscovery in the early 20th century, through spectacular finds such as those by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos, Minoan Crete has captured the imagination not only of archaeologists but also of a wider public. This is shown, among other things, by its appearance and uses in a variety of modern cultural practices: from the innovative dances of Sergei Diaghilev and Ted Shawn, to public and vernacular architecture, psychoanalysis, literature, sculpture, fashion designs, and even neo-pagan movements, to mention a few examples.Cretomania is the first volume entirely devoted to such modern responses to (and uses of) the Minoan past. Although not an exhaustive and systematic study of the reception of Minoan Crete, it offers a wide range of intriguing examples and represents an original contribution to a thus far underexplored aspect of Minoan studies: the remarkable effects of Minoan Crete beyond the narrow boundaries of recondite archaeological research.The volume is organised in three main sections: the first deals with the conscious, unconscious, and coincidental allusions to Minoan Crete in modern architecture, and also discusses archaeological reconstructions; the second presents examples from the visual and performing arts (as well as other cultural practices) illustrating how Minoan Crete has been enlisted to explore and challenge questions of Orientalism, religion, sexuality, and gender relations; the third focuses on literature, and shows how the distant Minoan past has been used to interrogate critically more recent Greek history.

In this collection, an eminent authority on the history of political thought and on the intellectual history of modern Hellenism employs his twin academic specializations in political science and in intellectual history to understand the intricacies of the historical experience of his native island. Writing in a perspective inspired by the work of Fernand Braudel, he attempts in a series of studies in cultural and social history to recover lost and overlooked aspects of the collective destinies of Cyprus and the Cypriot diaspora in the centuries of Ottoman rule, a period of critical significance for the survival of the people of the island. He then turns to a penetrating analysis of the politics of the Cyprus Question. The pertinent studies collected in this volume bear the imprint of the deep soul-searching by the younger generation of Cypriot scholars at the time of the tragedy of 1974 over what went so wrong that their country was exposed to foreign invasion, occupation and division. The hints at answers to these questions offered by the author’s interdisciplinary and critical treatment of the subject make this work an indispensable aid to anyone wishing to grasp the deeper antinomies and dilemmas immanent in the Cyprus Question.

Byzantium was a very influential part of the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement (1880–1910) in Britain, and although the influence of the Gothic Revival (1830–80) is well known, that of the Byzantine Revival (1840–1910) is not. This volume is about the people and the movements that created the Byzantine Revival and shows how they influenced British heritage from architecture to the decorative arts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The central pillars of the volume are the architects and scholars who created the Byzantine Research Fund (BRF) Archive, a unique collection of architectural drawings and photographs of numerous monuments across the Byzantine world, and the social and professional networks in which they circulated. The BRF members, an eclectic and little-known group, who based themselves at the newly founded British School at Athens, established the research of Byzantium in Britain and Greece. They were trained in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought authenticity in design and decoration in reaction to the styles that had developed through industrialisation. Their work, uniting a distinctively British design tradition with Byzantine arts and crafts, represents a highly significant and under-researched link between Britain and the Hellenic world. This volume is the first contribution to try to fill this knowledge gap.Byzantium and British Heritage will appeal to all those interested in the relation between Byzantine and British culture and Byzantine art.

In this collection, an eminent authority on the history of political thought and on the intellectual history of modern Hellenism employs his twin academic specializations in political science and in intellectual history to understand the intricacies of the historical experience of his native island. Writing in a perspective inspired by the work of Fernand Braudel, he attempts in a series of studies in cultural and social history to recover lost and overlooked aspects of the collective destinies of Cyprus and the Cypriot diaspora in the centuries of Ottoman rule, a period of critical significance for the survival of the people of the island. He then turns to a penetrating analysis of the politics of the Cyprus Question. The pertinent studies collected in this volume bear the imprint of the deep soul-searching by the younger generation of Cypriot scholars at the time of the tragedy of 1974 over what went so wrong that their country was exposed to foreign invasion, occupation and division. The hints at answers to these questions offered by the author’s interdisciplinary and critical treatment of the subject make this work an indispensable aid to anyone wishing to grasp the deeper antinomies and dilemmas immanent in the Cyprus Question.

The ‘Macedonian question’ has been much studied in recent years as has the political history of the period from the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. But for a variety of reasons, connected with the political division of Greece and the involvement of outside powers, the events at and behind the Macedonian front have been side-lined. The recent commemorations of the centenary of the end of the First World War in the UK illustrate how by comparison with the enormous and moving emphasis on the western front, Macedonia has been not wholly but largely ignored. This volume illuminates this comparatively neglected period of Greek history and examines the strategic and military aspects of the war in Macedonia and the political, social, economic and cultural context of the war.

Byzantium was a very influential part of the development of the Arts and Crafts Movement (1880–1910) in Britain, and although the influence of the Gothic Revival (1830–80) is well known, that of the Byzantine Revival (1840–1910) is not. This volume is about the people and the movements that created the Byzantine Revival and shows how they influenced British heritage from architecture to the decorative arts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The central pillars of the volume are the architects and scholars who created the Byzantine Research Fund (BRF) Archive, a unique collection of architectural drawings and photographs of numerous monuments across the Byzantine world, and the social and professional networks in which they circulated. The BRF members, an eclectic and little-known group, who based themselves at the newly founded British School at Athens, established the research of Byzantium in Britain and Greece. They were trained in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought authenticity in design and decoration in reaction to the styles that had developed through industrialisation. Their work, uniting a distinctively British design tradition with Byzantine arts and crafts, represents a highly significant and under-researched link between Britain and the Hellenic world. This volume is the first contribution to try to fill this knowledge gap.Byzantium and British Heritage will appeal to all those interested in the relation between Byzantine and British culture and Byzantine art.

Western travel and collecting classical antiquities in the nineteenth century informed European understandings of Greece's past and present, and enriched private collections and museums. Travel and collecting have typically been studied separately by literary scholars, historians of archaeology, and historians of the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece. Similarly, publications have largely prioritised evidence from and about elite social groups.This book breaks new ground through its interdisciplinary approach, its insistence on the interweaving of the phenomena of travel and collecting, and its emphasis on marginalised perspectives. Contributors drawn from art history, classics, history of architecture, Ottoman history and modern Greek history foreground diversity and small-scale engagements with the landscape and material past of Ottoman Greece. The book explores the perspectives of both foreign travellers and local inhabitants through case studies, keeping a sharp focus on ethnicity and social status. Diaries, visual art, and rich archival material are analysed, often from a novel perspective, to give voice to a range of people including English servants, Albanian peasants, an illiterate Greek fighter, and the Ottoman Sultan. The result is a micro-cultural history of travel and classical collecting which expands existing narratives. As such, it changes the simplistic dichotomy between collecting as ‘pillaging’ or ‘saving’, and nuances the important current debate surrounding repatriation.Travel and Classical Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Greece addresses scholars in the areas of classical reception studies, classical archaeology, material culture studies, nineteenth-century studies, Ottoman studies and modern Greek studies. It will also appeal to a broader audience of people interested in travel writing, the history of archaeology and the history of Greece.

The Greek Language after Antiquity offers an in-depth look at the diachrony of the Greek language, focusing on a period relatively neglected by modern scholarship: the more than 1,000 years between the end of Antiquity and the early modern period. These studies, written by experts in the field, target different levels of analysis (phonology, morphology, semantics, lexicon, dialectology, sociolinguistics), combining substantial primary data with various theoretical approaches.It begins with a radical proposal for a different approach to the historical linguistics of Greek, focused on the process of language diversification, as opposed to the traditional genetic approach to dialect emergence. Other topics include register variation in Byzantine literature, crucial for understanding the subsequent evolution of a written standard; morphological variation in conjunction with problems of textual transmission in medieval and early modern vernacular texts, with special focus on the notion of “philology”; evidence for language contact in the Late Medieval period; and the use of graphemic evidence, i.e. spelling, to detect changes in pronunciation over a long time span. Two chapters examine issues of word formation: one presents a new research project on diachronic derivational morphology; the other examines compound formation in the Cretan dialect. The final chapter examines theoretical and methodological issues in studying the historical semantics of Greek.This book is essential reading for researchers in Greek historical linguistics and especially useful for students, teachers and researchers in Classics, Byzantine studies and general linguistics, with important connections to the historical linguistics and text-critical studies of other languages, particularly Romance and Turkish.

The Greek Language after Antiquity offers an in-depth look at the diachrony of the Greek language, focusing on a period relatively neglected by modern scholarship: the more than 1,000 years between the end of Antiquity and the early modern period. These studies, written by experts in the field, target different levels of analysis (phonology, morphology, semantics, lexicon, dialectology, sociolinguistics), combining substantial primary data with various theoretical approaches.It begins with a radical proposal for a different approach to the historical linguistics of Greek, focused on the process of language diversification, as opposed to the traditional genetic approach to dialect emergence. Other topics include register variation in Byzantine literature, crucial for understanding the subsequent evolution of a written standard; morphological variation in conjunction with problems of textual transmission in medieval and early modern vernacular texts, with special focus on the notion of “philology”; evidence for language contact in the Late Medieval period; and the use of graphemic evidence, i.e. spelling, to detect changes in pronunciation over a long time span. Two chapters examine issues of word formation: one presents a new research project on diachronic derivational morphology; the other examines compound formation in the Cretan dialect. The final chapter examines theoretical and methodological issues in studying the historical semantics of Greek.This book is essential reading for researchers in Greek historical linguistics and especially useful for students, teachers and researchers in Classics, Byzantine studies and general linguistics, with important connections to the historical linguistics and text-critical studies of other languages, particularly Romance and Turkish.

Victorians and Modern Greece examines the representation of nineteenth-century Greece in British magazines, fiction, poetry, and travel writing, revealing the popular reception of the modern nation in the Victorian period. Reflecting upon the tensions–ancient and modern, oriental and European, primitive and developed–emerging from Victorian texts on Modern Greece, the 12 essays in this volume analyse these texts and their role in reconceptualising the national identity and culture of Britain and Greece through their encounter with each other.Featuring writers such as Mary Shelley, Christopher Wordsworth, William Thackeray, Theodore Bent, Isabella Fyvie Mayo, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee, as well as anonymous authors publishing in popular periodicals, and a broad range of topics from travel and fashion to political crises and the pervasive appeal of ruins, this book tells the story of Modern Greece from British perspectives, at a time when Greece was struggling to achieve self-definition among conflicting geopolitical interests. Victorians and Modern Greece also opens up Victorian studies to minor or marginal voices and narratives which addressed worldly concerns and Britain’s global affiliations.With its comparative perspective, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of both Victorian literature and culture and of the culture and history of Modern Greece.

For a century, the Aegean has stood as both a border and a bridge. The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey – the forced relocation of over a million Christians to Greece and some 400,000 Muslims to Turkey – transformed both states and societies. Refugee movements from occupied Greece to neutral Turkey during the Second World War, and more recently the crossings from Turkey to Greece of Syrians and others during ‘Europe’s refugee crisis’, highlight the Aegean as a recurring site of forced migration. Today, the region remains defined by militarised borders and the criminalisation of humanitarian actors.This book investigates the major forced population movements across the Aegean in the last 100 years. It uses the 1922-1923 forced population exchange as an intellectual point of departure to investigate the multiple refugee movements across the Aegean and their interconnections. It addresses the forced displacement of not only Turks and Greeks but also Jewish people and Syrians while also investigating the remembering of these episodes, within and beyond Turkey and Greece. Bringing together leading experts on Greece and Turkey, the volume advances a dialogue between national and international historiographies and offers fresh perspectives on the enduring legacies of displacement.Across the Aegean is essential reading for scholars and students of modern Greek and Turkish studies, cultural heritage, refugee/forced migration, and memory studies. Its insights also resonate with policy practitioners, journalists, and wider audiences seeking to understand how histories of displacement continue to shape the politics and societies of the Aegean today.

The ship transcends the descriptive categories of place, vehicle and artefact; it is a cosmos, which requires its own cosmology. This is the subject matter of this volume, which falls within the broader, flourishing sub-field of maritime anthropology. Specifically, the volume first investigates the dialectic between the sea, the ship and the ship-dweller and shows how traits are exchanged between the three. It then focuses on land-dwellers, their understanding of seaborne existence and their invaluable contribution to the culture of ships. It shows that the romanticised views of life at sea that land-dwellers hold constitute an important aspect of the cosmology of ships and they too need to be considered if the polyvalence of ships is to be fully understood. In order for this cosmology to be written, some of the volume’s contributors have travelled on ships and interviewed mariners, fishermen, boat-builders and boat-dwellers; others have traced the courses of ships in poems, films, philosophical texts, and collective myths of genealogy and heritage. Overall the volume shows where ships can go, and how they are perceived and experienced by those living and travelling in them, watching and waiting for them, dreaming and writing about them, and, finally, what literal and metaphorical crews man them.

Hellenomania, the second volume in the MANIA series, presents a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary exploration of the modern reception of ancient Greek material culture in cultural practices ranging from literature to architecture, stage and costume design, painting, sculpture, cinema, and the performing arts. It examines both canonical and less familiar responses to both real and imagined Greek antiquities from the seventeenth century to the present, across various national contexts. Encompassing examples from Inigo Jones to the contemporary art exhibition documenta 14, and from Thessaloniki and Delphi to Nashville, the contributions examine attempted reconstructions of an ‘authentic’ ancient Greece alongside imaginative and utopian efforts to revive the Greek spirit using modern technologies, new media, and experimental practices of the body. Also explored are the political resonances of Hellenomaniac fascinations, and tensions within them between the ideal and the real, the past, present, and future. Part I examines the sources and derivations of Hellenomania from the Baroque and pre-Romantic periods to the early twentieth century. While covering more canonical material than the following sections, it also casts spotlights on less familiar figures and sets the scene for the illustrations of successive waves of Hellenomania explored in subsequent chapters. Part II focuses on responses, uses, and appropriations of ancient Greek material culture in the built environment—mostly architecture—but also extends to painting and even gymnastics; it examines in particular how a certain idealisation of ancient Greek architecture affected its modern applications. Part III explores challenges to the idealisation of ancient Greece, through the transformative power of colour, movement, and of reliving the past in the present human body, especially female. Part IV looks at how the fascination with the material culture of ancient Greece can move beyond the obsession with Greece and Greekness.

This volume focuses on a formative period in the history and archaeology of northern Greece. The decade following 1912, when Thessaloniki became part of Greece, was a period marked by an extraordinary internationalism as a result of the population movements caused by the shifting of national borders and the troop movements which accompanied the First World War.The papers collected here look primarily at the impact of the discoveries of the Army of the Orient on the archaeological study of the region of Macedonia. Resulting collections of antiquities are now held in Thessaloniki, London, Paris, Edinburgh and Oxford. Various specialists examine each of these collections, bringing the archaeological legacy of the Macedonian Campaign together in one volume for the first time.A key theme of the volume is the emerging dialogue between the archaeological remains of Macedonia and the politics of Hellenism. A number of authors consider how archaeological interpretation was shaped by the incorporation of Macedonia into Greece. Other authors describe how the politics of the Campaign, in which Greece was initially a neutral partner, had implications both for the administration of archaeological finds and their subsequent dispersal. A particular focus is the historical personalities who were involved and the sites they discovered. The role of the Greek Archaeological Service, particularly in the protection of antiquities, as well as promoting excavation in the aftermath of the 1917 Great Fire of Thessaloniki, is also considered.

This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing ’proof’ of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.

This book explores the concept of ‘the Levant’ as a component of the regional and international system during the age of imperialism. At its heart is a focus on the experience of Greek-speaking societies and, above all, the independent state of Greece that came into existence in 1830. A key sub-theme running through the account is the Anglo-Hellenic connection stemming from an enhanced British presence in the Eastern Mediterranean from the 1830s and 1840s, and in particular its relationship to the Greek polity. Within this framework the emergence of the idea of ‘Greater Greece’ is integrated into the narrative, including its regional reverberations and ethnic tensions. Other contributions examine trade and finance, gender issues, colonialism and the distinctive experience of Cyprus. The core of the volume deals centrally with three interlocking themes: modernity, nationalism and trans-nationalism. Ultimately these forces were to prove at odds with the ambiguity and elite structures that characterized the Levant in its nineteenth-century heyday. The book analyses the evolution, and increasing definition from the late 1950s, of Greece’s modern European identity, while taking into account the magnetic force of other relationships and regional links. This treatment connects with the choices and dilemmas facing Greece and its surrounding region, which contemporary crises invariably throw into relief. It will be of interest both to specialised historians and students of current affairs seeking to understand the broader historical context.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and with British political influence over Greece soon to be ceded to the United States, there was a considerable degree of cultural interaction between Greek and British literati. Sponsored or assisted by the British Council, this interaction was notable for its diversity and quality alike. Indeed, the British Council in Greece made a more significant contribution to local culture in that period than at any other time, and perhaps in any other country. Many of the participants – among them Patrick Leigh Fermor, Steven Runciman, and Louis MacNeice – are well known, while others deserve to be better known than they are today. But what has been less fully discussed, and what the volume sets out to do, is to explore the two-way relations between Greek and British literary production in which the British Council played a particularly important role until the outbreak of armed conflict in Cyprus in 1955, which rendered further contacts of this kind difficult. Close attention is paid to the variety of ways – marked by personal affinities and allegiances, but also by political tensions – in which the British Council functioned as an agent of interaction in a climate where a complex blend of traditional Anglophilia or Philhellenism found itself encountering a new post-war and Cold War environment. What is distinctive about the volume, beyond the inclusion of much recent archival research, is its attention to the British Council as part of the story of Greek letters, and not just as a place in which various British men and women of letters worked. The British Council found itself, sometimes more through improvisation and personal affinities than through careful planning, at the heart of some key developments, notably in terms of important periodical publications which had a lasting influence on Greek letters. Though in the cultural forum that influence was arguably to be less pervasive than that of France, with its more ambitious cultural outreach, or than that of the USA in later decades, the role of the British Council in Greece in this crucial period of Greek (and indeed European) post-war history continues to make a rich case study in cultural politics. This volume thus fills a gap in the rich bibliography on Anglo-Greek relations and contributes to a wider scholarly and public discussion about cultural politics.