This week on Reviews we have a welcome reappraisal of a neglected classic, William McGrew’s Land and Revolution in Modern Greece, 1800-81, first published in 1985. Our reviewer Eugenia Russell reckons this to be the most important monograph on the early modern history of the country, written by an ardent philhellene and well overdue a new edition.
McGrew is just one of many foreigners to have fallen under Greece’s spell and subsequently written about the country. Lord Byron is probably the most famous, but his namesake Robert penned three ambitious studies in late Hellenism, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, as well as being one of the heroes of Anthony Beevor’s Crete: the Battle and the Resistance), wrote two glorious travelogues based on his adventures in Greece.