This is an enjoyable, fast-paced book which provides an excellent overview of Greek history from the Archaic period to the destruction of Corinth (800–146 b.c.). The seven centuries are dealt with in a highly readable manner under the direction of an expert curator. R. states early that his focus will be the ‘Greek heartland’, and this willingness to remain broadly pinned to the mainland, Aegean and west coast of Asia Minor allows a long period to be drawn intelligibly and in enough depth to be engaging, in a way that attempting to survey the full variety of Greek geographies in a ‘short history’ would not. The prose is focused and uncomplicated, but with enough geniality to soften the necessary hegemonic tone.

Space restrictions permit little that is unorthodox, and the reader is driven along a diachronic narrative formed around a political and military core. Athens predominates throughout, and it is Classical Athens that carries most weight and is treated in most detail. The rise and fall of Athenian power, the allure and inadequacies of Sparta, and the coming of Macedon are all accommodated to the partial exclusion of other major poleis and smaller communities. Indeed, because of this Athenocentrism, the Classical period is allocated more than twice the space than the Hellenistic period.

Good illustrations perform the important twin roles of enriching the reading experience and reinforcing concepts to the neophyte that would otherwise take too many words to convey. They are even more important here as they provide the reader's most direct interaction with primary sources. There are 24 choices (mainly site photos and material evidence) excellently reproduced. The three general maps are clear, but one is clumsily cropped and most of the Punjab as well as Cyrene in the West are lost. Greater use of maps in the main text would have been helpful to elucidate and illuminate such a compressed narrative.

There are 210 pages of narrative, a table of principal dates and a glossary. The index has some odd omissions (Pelopidas, Poetry, Sappho), whilst the endnotes do not point to any further reading, and most indeed are internal cross references that should perhaps have been inserted into the main text (as at p. 110). These notes have a bare minimum of primary references and no secondary bibliography. This is instead left for the short ‘further reading’ section, which points the reader to other general Greek history series and reference works.

The book's authority, accessibility and price should make it a regular feature on prescribed reading lists for A-Level students, and preparatory reading lists for undergraduates with no experience of Ancient Greece. The general reader will enjoy having a familiar Greece presented in detail but without the distraction of critical apparatus. It is questionable whether this volume meets many of the ambitious and somewhat contradictory aims outlined in the series preface, but it fills a gap in the provision of elementary Greek history, and with some finesse of the presentation, should remain useful and relevant for some time.