Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation - Hardcover

The best history of Greece around... Beautifully written and packed with insights about the culture and the people. I will be dipping into this book for the rest of my life. (Victoria Hislop The Week)

His new book - judicious, well-researched and commendably up-to-date - deserves to be the standard general history of modern Greece in English for years to come. (Financial Times)

Apart from his extraordinary erudition and scholarship, Beaton writes with measured compassion and a refreshingly straightforward style ... A magisterial and user-friendly study. (Richard Pine Irish Times)

Beaton salts the story with fascinating details which consistently surprise ... A scholarly and elegant introduction to this beguiling country. Serious students of history should read it, and no visitor to Greece should leave home without it. (Sean McMeekin Literary Review)

Splendid ... Mr Beaton's biographical conceit keeps the narrative focused, lively and clear ... both gripping and remarkably balanced. (David Mason Wall Street Journal)

This book explores the history, not of a Greece of romantic or philhellenic imagination, but the reality of the country as it has become today. The empathy it evokes for the survival of modern Greek statehood against a recurring pattern of often existential crisis is all the more compelling, subtle and above all human in its many-sidedness. Beaton's account instantly becomes the single most outstanding treatment of its subject and shows us why - as Lord Palmerston expressed it succinctly for his own times - 'Greece' is an emotional word that still matters to contemporary society. (Professor Robert Holland)

A wonderfully engaging narrative ... It is a superb achievement and to be recommended to anyone with even the most rudimentary interest (Professor Kevin Featherstone)

A perceptive analysis of Greece's financial crisis, the embers of which continue to threaten to derail the single currency project of the EU (Country Life)

Praise for Byron's War: Indispensable (Literary Review)