Mary Beard writes: Predictably enough, Leigh Fermor is disdainful of modern mass tourism in Greece. After conjuring up a picture in Roumeli of the modern Athenian taverna (‘Docile flocks converge on them, herded by button-eyed guides . . . all Manchester, all Lyons, all Cologne and half the Middle-West at heel’), he looks to the future: ‘In dark moments I see bay after lonely bay and island after island as they are today and as they may become . . . The shore is enlivened with fifty jukeboxes and a thousand transistor wirelesses. Each house is now an artistic bar, a boutique or a curio shop; new hotels tower and concrete villas multiply.’

John Murray General Publishing Division | Paperback 256 pp. |ISBN: 9780719566929