Eland Publishing

One of the most witty and idiosyncratic of travel books, Eothen started out as a few notes scribbled on the back of a map for a friend, but took Kinglake seven years of painstaking work to finesse. The physical details of the journey, undertaken in 1834 through Turkey, Cyprus, the Holy Land, Cairo and Damascus, are barely mentioned. The infectious charm lies in the conversations, the whimsical chance encounters and the attitudes of the author. Kinglake was writing to amuse but also to lampoon the pomposity of earnest travelers seeking to establish themselves as professional authorities. His literary assassination of the self-deluded expatriate Lady Hester Stanhope, is ruthless. The influence of Eothen has been felt by generation upon generation of writers. Mark Twain, Peter Fleming, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Paul Theroux and William Dalrymple have all saluted the book and recognized Kinglake as a stylist without equal.

In "The Hill of Kronos", Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. Then the sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Greece, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries. Lastly, it is seen through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience, a gift of insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.