THE GREEK REVOLUTION

1821 AND THE MAKING OF MODERN EUROPE MARK MAZOWER

Allen Lane, 572pp, £30

Mazower’s book ‘offers the best and fullest explanation, to date, for a series of events whose effects would change the entire geopolitics of Europe’, declared Roderick Beaton in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Written with compassion and understanding for the human cost of that achievement, it deserves to remain the standard treatment of the subject in English for many decades to come.’

Between 1821 and 1829 the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire and won their independence, with help from Britain, France, and Russia. ‘As the subtitle of Mark Mazower’s new book maintains, events in Greece 200 years ago helped shape modern Europe,’ wrote the Economist’s anonymous reviewer. ‘His elegant and rigorous account also holds lessons for modern geopolitics: about the galvanising effects of violence, the role of foreign intervention and the design flaws in dreams.’ In the

Financial Times, Tony Barber praised the author for his ‘engaging combination of fast-flowing narrative and insightful analysis’, while Daily

Telegraph reviewer Julian Evans found the book ‘superbly subtle and thorough’. For Lea Ypi, in the New

Statesman, Mazower uses ‘vivid detail, impeccable scholarship and great nuance’ to show ‘how the modern idea of the nation emerges out of the complex, sometimes random and often messy interactions between a plurality of agents’.

It was left to Noonie Minogue, writing in the Tablet, to depart from ruminations about geopolitics and emphasise the ‘epic narrative, both scholarly, breathlessly page-turning and packed with hauntingly romantic characters. Few historians dig so deep or with such sympathy into what history felt like to those living through it... anyone in search of an opera plot should scour these drama-packed pages.’