After 1945 Greece and Britain entered a new phase of their close, but never uncomplicated, relationship. The long tradition of classically-educated philhellenism, which persisted through the Second World War, unravelled in its aftermath. The Cyprus crisis and the Dictatorship, the rise of mass tourism and the mass media, the ‘Olympic effect’ and the economic and political challenges of EU membership have all left their mark on the ways the two countries respond to each other.

David Wills's earlier monograph, The Mirror of Antiquity: 20th Century British Travellers in Greece [reviewed in BMGS 32] analysed how travel writers have presented Greek places and people to British readers; in this edited volume he brings together a range of English and Greek commentators to explore two-way encounters: cultural, political and organisational.

Three chapters focus on literary questions. Peter Mackridge's essay on the bilingual writer Kay Cicellis is the first full account of the range of Cicellis’ original work in both English and Greek (she remains better known as a translator); Mackridge explores the ‘unresolved dilemma’ of the writer caught between two worlds, and languages, in a ‘transnational’ mode which does not fit comfortably into any one tradition. He raises important questions about what can be expressed by a writer with access to more than one language, and what an apparently ‘anomalous’ figure may contribute to our ideas of a national canon. (In a later chapter the experience of displacement is evoked at first hand by Loretta Proctor, whose ‘Anglo-Greek Identity Crisis’ derives from the very different thought processes, religious practices and traditions of music, myth and family life that she feels she has inherited from her Greek mother and English father.)

In ‘Mist, Melancholy People, Unemployment and Rapists’, Eleni Papargyriou analyses some versions of London as portrayed in Greek fiction since 1974, a moment when Greek writers increasingly turned to foreign settings as a way of exploring their own national predicaments. The anonymity of the metropolis, its alien climate, social diversity and associations with literary Modernism test the self-image of the authors and their characters as Greeks in a ‘Westernised’ Europe. In his chapter on the translation and reception of Modern Greek literature in Britain David Connolly connects the volume and type of translation at any one time with external factors such as cultural diplomacy and the varying fortunes of Modern Greek Studies as an academic subject. After a productive period from 1945 to 1974, in which many major novelists and poets were translated, activity slowed and translations tended to be published by smaller companies with limited distribution. From the 1990s interest in translation (mainly of fiction) has revived, but Greek literature still remains comparatively unknown to British readers: only Kazantzakis and Cavafy are recognisable names.

Chapters Five and Six of Britain and Greece since 1945 are concerned with the work of British organisations in Greece. In ‘Re-Imag(in)ing Arcadia’, Alexandra Moschovi analyses photographs taken during and immediately after the war by two Greek nurses: Voula Papaioannou (with UNRAA) and Maria Chroussaki (with the British Red Cross). The photographs (several of them reproduced in this volume) document such activities as the distribution of food and clothing, medical examinations and the repatriation of refugees. Moschovi argues that their techniques of composition, lighting and framing invoke ethnographic and aesthetic conventions of a ‘timeless’ Greece to communicate an urgent and persuasive message to a ‘Western’ public. The role of the British Council is discussed by Jim Potts, who traces the interplay between the fortunes of the Council in Greece and the fluctuating fortunes of Greek–UK understanding. He recalls the many English writers and scholars who worked in or visited Greece under the auspices of the Council (especially in the famous decade 1945–55), the debates about its purpose and mission and the attenuation of its role in the present century.

David Wills's own chapter, ‘British Reactions to the Military Dictatorship of 1967–74’, focuses on fiction and travel writing; a persistent theme is the contrast between the ‘cradle of democracy’ topos and the authoritarianism of the Junta. Although many tourists took little notice of what was happening, writers such as Glyn Hughes and Peter Levi attempted to make sense of and bear witness to events and conditions in Greece.

It was during the Dictatorship that Greece first became familiar to British television audiences, through the drama series The Lotus Eaters, filmed on location in Crete. In his essay on the television dramas of Michael J. Bird, David Rice describes the enormous impact on tourist numbers of this series and the subsequent Who Pays the Ferryman?—the villages of Aghios Nikolaos and Elounda developed out of all recognition and the popularity of Greek tourism soared in every country where the series were screened.

Brian Church, whose inimitable column in the Athens News chronicled for English readers the vagaries of life in the Greek capital, here contributes a comic-satiric account of rioters’ attacks on the Exarcheia police station: tear gas and petrol bombs are a permanent, even routine, aspect of ‘Civil Discourse in Contemporary Athens’. Church poses the eternal dilemma of a sympathetic outsider confronted with the more chaotic aspects of Greek behaviour: ‘how to change the mindset without changing the soul’.

To take account of the effects of the Greek ‘crisis’ after 2008 this second edition has four new chapters. Three of them address cultural issues. Agatha Kalisperas argues for the importance, for both local people and Greek expatriates, of the Hellenic Centre in London, especially at times when Greece is receiving adverse publicity. Richard Pine describes the Durrell School, founded in Corfu in 2002 to promote interest in the Durrell brothers and in the history and culture of the Ionian Islands; William Mallinson introduces the Laboratory for the Documentation of the History of British–Greek Relations newly established in Corfu at the Ionian University. The fourth additional chapter, George N. Tzogopoulos’ ‘Interpreting the Greek Crisis from a British Media Perspective’, reviews and quantifies representations of Greece in British newspapers; the author concludes that the coverage, though often negative, is broadly accurate and fair.