Book Review - The Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924 by Howard M. Sachar

 The Emergence of the Middle East 1914-1924 by Howard M. Sachar

London: Allen Land The Penguin Press, 1970 (first published 1969)  ISBN 0713901586

This is a well-written history in the old style, describing the impact the First World War had on the creation of what we know now as the countries of the Middle East and its littoral - specifically Greece, Turkey, Syria, Palestine as it then was (Israel now), Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Before World War One, all of these countries apart from Greece were part of the Ottoman Empire, and this book is essentially a description of how that Empire was broken up, mainly through the actions of the victorious members of the Entente, specifically England and France.

Many of us think we know the history of how the modern Middle East came to be, but Sachar's book taught me things I didn't know about what occurred during these years; things that have filled in some gaps in my knowledge and brought to me a greater understanding of why history in that part of the world has developed in the way it has.

The Ottoman Empire's fateful decision to side with Germany during the War brought ruin. The British, fearing for their access to the Suez Canal, went to great efforts to defeat the Ottomans in Palestine, and used everything at their disposal, including inciting the Arabian Peninsula to revolt. This is of course a famous story, and Sachar fills it out in a historical sense, pointing out the limited effectiveness of the revolt in the fight against their Turkish overlords (it was the British army that did most of the "heavy lifting"), and putting the Lawrence legend into proper historical perspective.

A story less well-known is the Ottoman's war against Russia, which was, until the Revolution a successful one for the Entente, as opposed to the disaster at Gallipoli. Iraq was hellish for both sides - initially a tactical failure by the British, although strategically important. Ottoman losses were catastrophic, and when the end came, the carcass of their Empire was up for grabs.

Sachar describes the machinations of the carve-up of the Empire well. He shows us that the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement was in some ways only a minor cause of the current problems in the Middle East. The British imagined a rule over Mesopotamia (Iraq), but initially wanted the Arabs to rule their own kingdom, which included the interior of Syria, all of Palestine, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The French scuppered the Syrian part of the plan, insisting that they extend their rule beyond the coastal strip (including Lebanon) and having suzerainty over the inland as well. After initial talks, an agreement between Feisal and the Jewish communities in Palestine could not be reached: because England had committed to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, they felt that they had the right and indeed the responsibility to rule in that place. The machinations between the pro-Jewish and pro-Arab sections of the British government did much to poison relations between Jew and Arab there, with results that echo down to today.

Feisal was sent to Baghdad to rule over the protectorate of Iraq, while his brother Abdullah was given the Transjordan area as his feifdom, much to the anger of the Jewish people in Palestine, who thought that they would inherit this. It must be remembered that all these areas were not colonies of the two European imperial powers, but protectorates under a League of Nations mandate. As Sachar points out, this kindled the idea and hope within natives of these areas that one day they would be masters in their own lands, which did indeed happen after the next great conflagration.

The remaining part of the Empire, Turkey (Sachar does not really deal with Arabia in this book), was a different story. Defeated, dispirited and exhausted, but the fighting was not over. The Armenians (Sachar devotes a chapter to their war time destruction within Anatolia) attacked the Turks to claim their homeland, assisted by the Russians. After setbacks, Kemal managed to destroy them. The Greeks, based around Smyrna, attacked initially to gain territory that had a plurality of their countrymen, but after initial successes, tried to get to Ankara. Kemal again defeated the Greeks and destroyed their army in Turkey. The Italians, French and English, tired of war and the expense of occupation, forced a solution at the Lausanne conference, beginning the biggest mass exodus of populations in history to that stage, and in the process creating a (basically) ethnically homogenous Greece and Turkey.

There is much base politics and treachery in this story, all of which is well told by Sachar. His descriptions of many of the major players give a good sense of the type of people they were, and he manages to tie this multi-stranded story into one connected thread. When I began this book I suspected that it would turn out to be a dry academic tome, but it's actually quite readable, accompanied with decent maps, notes and bibliography.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

 Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Carl Wildman

London: Faber & Faber, 2016 (First published in Greek 1946, in English 1952)   ISBN 9780571323272

My wife is a huge fan of this book, and the movie that sprang from it. As I understand it, she had to read Zorba at school, and the experience turned her into a lover of literature. We were talking about Zorba a couple of weeks ago, and she was flabbergasted that I hadn't read the book, and could barely remember the movie (which I saw decades ago). So, I decided to pick up a copy, and I'm glad that I did.

Zorba the Greek is a meditation on life: on living life rather than looking at it from the outside, on jumping into experiences rather than missing out through fear or doubt, and about looking into the future, rather than dwelling on the past. These opposites are drawn out via the relationship between Zorba and the narrator of the novel, who as a writer is grappling with these very problems. Zorba is the everyman we wish to be: fighter, worker, lover, enjoyer of the gifts life has to offer. The narrator is all of the rest of us: full of fear and doubt, afraid to jump into life to be taken along by the current, and forever searching for something greater that we are never sure actually exists.

Zorba knows and understands the venality and corruption of the human race, and yet loves all in spite of that. He has worked through his passions and come to the realisation that all humanity is worthy of our love, especially those that are impinged upon by religion and class. He states that he has learned that there is no nationality and no religion, just good or bad people, and to take those people as they come. While the narrator works hard on his book about the Buddha and questions earthly activities, Zorba has accepted that the life he has is the one he must live to the fullest.

The life the narrator and Zorba share on Crete is by turns funny, heart-warming, and tragic. While the narrator has gone to Crete to both live a "real" life and to eschew his normal writerly existence, Zorba can't help but to take on everything with gusto, from digging in a mine, loving the roué Bouboulina, to eating a freshly cooked lamb and drinking wine. He has an inexhaustible energy, and a capability to see everything with the wonder of a first encounter, that entrances both the narrator and us as readers.

In the end, the money-making ventures all turn to dust, and Zorba and the narrator part, both to continue living in their own separate ways, and to be dragged along by the vicissitudes of history. This final section of the novel is almost unbearable, as we see that together the narrator and Zorba were vibrant, and apart, less so.

This book went much deeper than I thought it would - highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Corfu by Robert Dessaix

 Corfu: a novel by Robert Dessaix

Sydney: Picador, 2001                                                    ISBN 033036278X

I found this a strange book. A book without a story, but about stories. A book about love, but with little love in it. It is a book set in Greece, but not about Greece. I spent much of the time when reading this book wondering where it would go - in the end, I'm not sure it went anywhere. And yet I read it to the finish.

The narrator of Corfu is an actor who works in a small company rehearsing Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) in London, where he comes into contact with William, a loose-limbed, happy-go-lucky set designer. There is a frisson between them, or so our narrator thinks. William and our hero (an appropriate term I think, as there is a connexion between our protagonist and Odysseus, as is touched on throughout the book) circle around each other, with our hero unable to understand the take-it-as-it comes attitude of William.

Our hero leaves William in a hotel room in Rome. Unable to come to terms with his feelings, he flees to Corfu, where he rents the house of Kester Berwick, an expatriate Australian actor who is in Athens for reasons that our hero never finds out. He soon becomes fascinated with Berwick, through reading his clippings and manuscripts, and talking to the other expats about him. He can never pin down Berwick's true character - views of him vary from charlatan to guru. Our hero is disturbed when he finds a photograph of Berwick with William...

He learns that Berwick led a life of loss, losing lovers to time and chance and the wheels of history. Meanwhile he hears that William is on his way to Corfu, and so he flees again, this time to Lesbos, where he encounters a group of witches trying to get in touch with the other side. Eventually he returns to Corfu where he meets with William again, and they consummate their relationship.

Our hero decides to put on a production of Uncle Vanya, using locals as the actors. He and William decide to go back together to Adelaide (where both of them, and Berwick, hail from), until, on the night of the performance, William says he's not going. An epilogue, set five years later, describes how Berwick and quite a few other characters have died, and that our hero has never heard from William again.

If this seems a thin and unsatisfying story, it's because it is a thin and unsatisfying story. It's hard to have sympathy for our hero, as he seems to veer between fear, shame and paranoia about William. Much of the novel is our hero's thoughts on Chekhov, Homer, the former Empress of Austria, C.P. Cavafy, among others. At times it seemed to me that this was intellectual posturing, but as I read further that feeling faded a little, although I still struggled to see how Chekhov fitted in with, let alone should have been such a major part of, this book (Dessaix has written extensively on Russian literature, and completed a PhD on the subject).

Dessaix muses in this book on the themes of life and love. Our hero has an epiphany when rehearsing Uncle Vanya, that the ordinariness of life is just as, if not more, important as the dramatic moments. Our hero too struggles with the idea of love, with the idea of giving oneself to someone, without knowing where that might lead. As he begins to think that he can do that with William, William leaves him, and "something inside went dead". 

That seems to be what happened to Kester as well, ending up on Corfu to live out his life without wants (because wanting is dangerous perhaps?). I was disappointed to find out, after I had finished this novel, that Kester Berwick is a real person - I feel it is another failure of imagination in this book.

There is no doubt this novel is well written, and that Dessaix is a man of learning, but I found that the "soul" of this book - the something inside - was, for me, dead. I don't feel that I've come to the end of this book knowing more than I did before I started it - about myself, or the world. And that's a shame.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Birds, Beasts and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

Birds, Beasts and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

London: Collins, 1969

The second book in Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy (I have reviewed the first book here), Birds, Beasts and Relatives is not really a sequel to My Family and Other Animals, more an extension. Durrell has mined his and his family's memories to add to the trove of stories about their life on Corfu. We are introduced to some new characters along the way, as well as re-meeting Theodore and Spiro, the Durrell's two closest friends on Corfu.

As always, it is Gerald's description of the natural life of Corfu that is most appealing - his writing takes the reader to the olive groves and beaches of this wonderful island, and we share his fascination with everything that walks, crawls or flies past him. And it is his love of animals that find him in some very strange situations: at the birth of a son to a local peasant woman, watching it all (along with all her relatives), to dining with a Countess who lived alone with her strange manservant. These stories are interspersed with hilarious tales of the people Larry brought home to tea - Sven the Swedish accordianist, Captain Creech, who is as bad as he sounds, and Max and Donald, a sort of Laurel and Hardy double-act.

The beauty of books such as these well-written and evocative memoirs is that they take the reader out of themselves on a journey into someone else's life and times, and help us to forget whatever troubles we might be suffering. If you want to be taken away from where you are now, I can highly recommend Birds, Beasts and Relatives.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, with an afterword by Peter J.S. Olney

London: Macmillan Collector's Library, 2016 (first published 1956)

ISBN 9781909621985

What an absolutely wonderful book! I was drawn to reading it having seen the television series The Durrells, and I'm so glad that I was. I have known of Gerald Durrell since my early childhood owing to his work with endangered animals, having seen him on television, but until now have not read any of his 37 published books. My Family and Other Animals is the first of book of what has become known as the "Corfu Trilogy" of books Durrell wrote about his family's time spent on the Greek island of Corfu.

And what a wonderful time they had - Louisa, Gerald's mother was the kind-hearted head of the family (a widow), Larry, the eldest, a budding novelist, Leslie mad for hunting and guns, Margo the fashionista, and Gerry forever on the hunt for wildlife to observe and collect.

My Family and Other Animals is a wonderful collection of stories, some too good to be true (but they apparently were so) about the Durrell's life on Corfu, their family life and arguments, the friends they made and their eccentricities, and the natural life of the island. Gerry is a wonderful story-teller, and each chapter is a delight of humour and wonderful descriptions of the seasons and what they bring.

From the chaos caused by Gerry's magpies at a big family party, to their friend Spiro stealing goldfish from the King of Greece's palace, to Larry almost drowning in mud in an attempt to prove that Leslie's achievement of getting a "left-and-a-right" (killing two birds with two shots from a double-barreled shotgun) was not a big deal, to Margo nearly dying from actually kissing the feet of St. Spiridon, each chapter takes the reader into a different, simpler, more beautiful world, which, given what is going on today in the midst of COVID-19, is a gift.

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Crete: the Battle and the Resistance by Antony Beevor

Crete: the Battle and the Resistance by Antony Beevor

London: John Murray, 2005 (1st published 1991)    ISBN 9780719568312

I found this book - the first in Antony Beevor's justly celebrated histories of various campaigns of World War II - incredibly hard to read. Not because Beevor's writing is flawed - far from it: but because the story of Crete in World War II is a tragic one of flawed tactics, wrong-headedness and missed opportunities on both sides, and an appallingly unnecessary loss of life.

After the debacle of the Greek Campaign, which Beevor briefly touches on, there was little doubt that the Wehrmacht intended to take Crete. In fact the British knew, thanks to their ability to read the German code, not only the German's intentions, but also to a great extent the timing and size of the attack.

One would think that, even with troops still recovering from retreat and defeat on the mainland, this advantage would be decisive, especially considering they outnumbered the German troops by a factor of almost 2:1. The problems stemmed from the top: General Freyberg, whilst undoubtedly brave and caring of his men, was very fixed in his ideas and not gifted tactically. He seems to have almost willfully mis-interpreted the Ultra signals, and fixed his mind on the idea that the main invasion force was to come by sea, with the paratroop drop merely a precursor. This mistaken view was the main reason the Allies lost the island.

And what of the German side? General Student's plan of drops at all airfields on the Northern coast meant that his forces were stretched dangerously thin, with little ability to co-operate if they were hard pressed. The appalling lack of intelligence meant that Student was deceived into thinking the numbers of Allied troops were much less than the actual numbers on the island, and so he thought his paratroops could take the island purely by airborne assault (it is one of the ironies of war that Student was the officer commanding troops at Arnhem, troops the Allies didn't know was there because of an intelligence failure).

Both sides were heinously deficient in radio equipment, vital in a country both mountainous and with poor transport infrastructure. The lack of communication would affect the British very much in the first days of the invasion.

The upshot of all these failings is that most German paratroops dropped into a hail of gunfire, and while their losses were appalling, Freyberg's misjudgment and the lack of communication between his troops meant that one airfield was taken by German troops, and this was enough to allow them to bring in enough re-inforcements to win the battle. Beevor describes this disaster well, describing some very heroic (and some not-so-heroic) actions on both sides.

The second part of this book describes the four years of occupation and resistance to Nazi control over Crete, focusing mainly on the work of the British SOE operatives that were in constant touch with the bands of Cretan resistance forces that based themselves in the mountains and kept pressure on the occupying forces. Beevor covers the politics of the various Cretan forces: republican, nationalist, and communist, as well as the politics of the special forces, with their jealousies and rivalries affecting at different times not only operations in Crete, but across the Balkans.

The heroism of the Cretans, from the armed bands to the village women who risked all to shelter Allied soldiers, is hard to fathom in the modern world, but is as admirable as any other sacrifice made in those much harder times.

While Crete might have only been headline news during the War in the few short weeks when it was the frontline (and after Leigh-Fermor kidnapped General Kriepe, which Beevor covers briskly and well), there was much activity there for a long period. It is hard to think of a book that covers it better than this one.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book review - Abducting a General by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Abducting a General : the Kreipe Operation in Crete by Patrick Leigh Fermor

New York: New York Review Books, 2014                 ISBN 9781590179383

Those (very few) of you who are regular readers of my blog will know of my love of the works of Fermor, especially his walking trilogy. So, I'm slowly finding and working my way through his oevre. The book under review here is recently published, but written by Fermor in 1966. It is his account of the abduction of General Kreipe, of which the first account was written by Fermor's second-in-command Billy Moss under the title Ill met by moonlight. There was also a broader account written by one of Fermor's Cretan companions entitled The Cretan Runner. This last title was translated by Fermor and published in England in the mid 50s, about the same time as Moss' book, with a film version of Ill met by moonlight produced later on in that decade.

It's a mystery why Fermor never published an account, given that by the mid 1950s he was already a published author. The excellent Foreword to this book suggests that Fermor had promised Moss that he would not tread on his toes. Fermor actually wrote this account for a serialised history of World War Two edited by Barrie Pitt, but as was often the case when Fermor was commissioned to write a piece, he went overtime and over the word limit, and the account published was heavily edited.

This edition by New York Review Books is the first time Fermor's account has been published in full. At 94 pages, it is short (but longer than the 5,000 words he was originally asked for!), evocative of the moment, the man and the mission. Fermor had been in Crete for a long time before he embarked on this mission, and had actually successfully spirited another General off the island (The Italian commander, after Italy had surrendered).

Fermor's love for the Cretan people overflows this work - full of praise for their generosity and assistance, he glosses over their baser feelings and activities. To flesh out the book extracts from Fermor's official reports to HQ have been appended to this work - they show that in action Fermor was more ruthless than he makes out in his memoir here - he was not reluctant to execute traitors to the cause, or plan mass attacks on the German troops garrisoning the island.

Fermor's book does not add too much to the story as it is already known - a daring abduction followed by weeks of hiding out in the rugged Cretan countryside, aided by partisan bands, before finally being whisked away by the Navy. While Fermor describes the harshness of travelling through the country being followed by the Germans, in true British style he prefers to linger over the wine and food and the beauty of nature than be too concerned with possible death.

Humour pops up as well - much consternation at the rendezvous on the beach when it is realised that neither Fermor and Moss (both SOE operatives), know the Morse Code for the letters they are meant to flash to the waiting ship!

While the operation was a great success, it had little strategic value - Kreipe was not much of a catch (the original intended abductee General Muller, was a known War Criminal), and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Canada.

Fermor ended up back on Crete for a time and ended the War in London.

As well as the inclusion of Fermor's official reports, there is a section that describes Fermor's journey across Crete with the General, which would allow the avid reader to walk in his footsteps.

In the schema of Fermor's writings, this is a minor work, but a good read nevertheless.

 Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Greek war of independence by David Brewer

The Greek war of independence : the struggle for freedom from Ottoman oppression and the birth of the modern Greek nation by David Brewer

Woodstock USA: The Overlook Press, 2001                               ISBN 158567172X


There is a famous saying "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it": of course this is demonstrably false, and yet there are remarkable threads that run through history, especially the history of nations and peoples. Reading this book has been a fascinating exercise in reading what happened in Greece in the early nineteenth century, with the gloss of the current Greek crisis overlaid.

The idea of a Greek nation is almost as old as civilization itself, although Ancient Greece was not a single political entity, but rather hundreds of separate city states who all tapped into the Greek heritage even when they were fighting each other. After the Roman Empire faded away, Greece fell back into obscurity and domination by others until in the early eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire became the hegemon.

As David Brewer describes in the early section of this well-written book, the Ottomans were not close governors of many of their provinces, Greece being one of them. They collected taxes (or sold the right to collect taxes to locals) and conscripted young men into their fighting forces, but did little else for the Greeks. The local clergy were responsible to the Sultan for the behaviour of their flock, and many Greeks became functionaries in the Empire. This led to widespread distrust among Greeks and between Greek communities, as the Empire also treated each province differently; some paying lesser tax, or having more freedom than others.

Religion was also an issue: the idea of a group of Christians being ruled over by an Islamic Empire did not sit well, not only with Greeks who desired to be free, but with other nations - especially Russians - who had a strong connexion to their Orthodox brethren. This issue was used as a pretext for action by various groups for various reasons during the struggle for independence, although until fighting started the Sultan allowed his Christian subjects much freedom in the practice of their religion, even if he was the one appointing the Patriarchs and Bishops.

As with many revolutions, the spark for the Greek uprising was struck outside the country itself by expatriates, Korais and Rigas, and the members of the secret society Philiki Eteria, which was more a grouping of hopeful idealists than a true movement for revolution. This did not stop the leader of the Eteria, expatriate Alexander Ipsilantis, from launching an abortive uprising in the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, which failed, due to Alexander's inability to lead or communicate effectively, or garner the hoped for support from Russia, or even to make it to Greece itself.

Although Ipsilantis' revolt was a failure, it led to a further revolt by the inhabitants of the Mani in the Peloponnese, which took advantage of the lack of Turkish troops stationed there at the time (owing to the uprising of Ali Pasha in Albania), and quickly grabbed some key fortresses and the major administrative centre Tripolis. With the help of a small but sporadically effective naval campaign, and use of guerrilla tactics in the rugged Greek countryside, the various Greek bands managed to hold key pieces of territory which enabled the rebellion to take root.

Brewer deftly describes the various competing sides that became apparent as the struggle continued - the Sultan in Constantinople not always in tune with Mehmed Ali, the Khedive of Egypt, who had his own agenda, and the Greeks - forming a constantly re-arranging group of alliances and enmities which at times descended into civil war - cruelling many opportunities which led to military disaster on more than one occasion. In fact the jealousies, empire-building and feather-bedding undertaken by almost everyone involved on the Greek side makes for depressing reading - the war was won almost in spite of the Greeks.

The involvement of foreign powers was not always above reproach either. Russia ostensibly had noble motives in becoming involved in the struggle, but balanced everything against its need to remain allies with France, Britain and Austria, and its desire to gain territory at the expense of the Turks. The French were schizophrenic in their approach, wooing both Greeks and Egyptians for different reasons, so much so that they had officers on both allied and Sultanate ships during the Battle of Navarino, which was the event that finally drew the Ottomans to the conference table.

No war can be fought without money, and lots of it, and the tale of Greek finances is one that echoes down to today. The Greeks raised loans mostly in England, based on wildly fanciful notions of their capacity to repay the principal, let alone the interest. They were not helped by the rapacious activities of the banks, nor by the wastage of the money they were lent, frittered away on expenditure on "ghost" troops, ships that were never finished (or deliberately scuttled by their own side!), and other unfortunate events. These loans were never repayed, and dogged the new nation for years afterwards (a period which is beyond the scope of Brewer).

It was the English loans to Greece that brought Lord Byron into the picture, and although his activities during the war were mostly ineffectual, it was his death in Mesolonghi that caught the imagination of Europe, and led to the interventions by the Great Powers that finally gave Greece freedom. While the foundation story of the modern Greek state gives great prestige to the defenders of Mesolonghi, the routers of Dramali, and the besieged of Athens, it was the pressures in other parts of the Ottoman Empire (Egypt, the 1828 war with Russia) that led the Sultan to come to terms and agree to Greek independence.

The first Greek President, Kapodhistrias, was acclaimed by nearly all when he took charge, but was assassinated a few year later, after suffering several rebellions to his rule. Brewer deals well with the constitutional waverings of the war years, showing how noble ideas failed to work in practice, and manoeuvrings by various factions meant that none of the structures of government worked in the way that had been intended.

Overall, Brewer's book is a very good introduction to the Greek independence struggle. He sets the scene well, covers all the major battles and events, and leaves the story at the moment the King of Greece is crowned. Brewer is an Englishman (a Classics scholar at Oxford), and as such this is an English view, with perhaps more space being given to the English stories in the book than the French or Russian, although it seems mainly an even-handed coverage. The maps are basic but sufficient to orient the reader. A couple of things that may annoy are the quotations from the French that have not been translated, and the spelling of the Greek names throughout - Brewer is consistent in his spellings, but in quotations uses the spelling of the original author. This can be confusing, especially when the original author is an Englishman writing in the early 1800s; there were several occasions where the person being referred to was not obvious at first reading.

However, those quibbles aside, I can recommend this book, especially now, as many Greek traits we are seeing during their current troubles can be seen in embryo in this story.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Hill of Kronos by Peter Levi

The Hill of Kronos by Peter Levi

London : Arena, 1987                                                              ISBN 0099331500


Peter Levi, poet, archaeologist, scholar, Jesuit Priest, was one of those people who were on what I call the "literary periphery". Someone you've vaguely heard of, usually in relation to someone else. Levi was good friends with the Greek poet George Seferis, and of Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and in more recent years was possibly even better known as the travelling companion of Bruce Chatwin during his journeys in Afghanistan, retracing Robert Byron's route in the Road to Oxiana (in fact Levi wrote a book about that trip The light garden of the Angel King : Journeys in Afghanistan, which has been reprinted several times - each reprint seemingly with more emphasis on Chatwin's photographs).

The Hill of Kronos is an autobiographical work - written later in life, Levi looks back on his various journeys to Greece, a land that meant a lot to him. His first visit took place when he was still studying to be a priest, as both the Seminary and Levi thought it would be good for him to take a break from his studies. Levi had gone through school with a love of Ancient Greek, and his first trip to Greece was as a budding archaeologist, travelling by foot over legendary landscapes in search of places mentioned by Pausanias' Guide to Greece.

As an archaeologist, it soon becomes clear in the narrative that Levi is a dilettante in the original meaning of the word - he is too interested in everything to be focussed enough on the task, but broad enough in his interests to see much that might have been overlooked until that stage. Reading in 2014 about his trip in 1963 it's amazing to realise just how much of the ancient world had yet to be studied and recorded at that time - Levi made trips to several places that had been untouched until then.

During this first trip Levi also sought out Greek poets - Seferis in particular, but also Odyseus Elytis and Nikos Gatsos. The generosity of these poets to Levi had an important effect on him and in some ways his writing about them is a eulogy for their nobility, and for a time in Greek letters that was coming to an end.

The highlight though, for Levi and the reader are his travels through the Greek countryside, and his interactions with local Greeks. His earliest trip occurred before tourism became a major influence in many of the places he visited, so he was something of a novelty to many of the locals, who were unfailingly generous in their hospitality. In 1963, many of the locals remembered the British from the War, and Levi met many who fought against the Germans for their freedom.

That makes the second part of the book - Levi's time in Greece under the Colonels - all the more heart-rending. He is witness to (and a minor player in) the slow constriction of Greek society under dictatorship, and of the increasing attempts to break the hold of the Colonels on political life. Levi's small part in the drama of the resistance earns him attention from the Police, which is in parts hilarious and in parts terrifying. He is eventually banned from the country for a time.

The final section of the book is his re-visitation, many years later. Levi is definitely a changed man - no longer a priest, he is married, and his wife and step-son accompany him on a trip that finds old friends dead, the landscape changed and scarred by modernity and tourism, but some of the old truths surviving.

This short book is elegaic in tone in almost every way - Levi has written a paen for an older way of life in Greece, and he himself was one of the last of a certain type of writer, writing the type of book that we will see less and less of in the future. Educated but not overbearing, democratic but not prescriptive, informative but not preaching, inspired but not demagogic, stylish but not overwrought, this book contains a type of writing that flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but is no more, I fear (I hope wrongly).

As someone who can in no way approach the style and intelligence of this kind of work (as evidenced by this review!), I recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell