Why am I passionate about this?
I became passionate about ancient Greece as a teenager when I studied the ancient languages and history at school. I was also lapping up ancient Greece on film—back then the so-so Burton-Taylor Cleopatra really impressed. I got enthused by historical novels too, Mary Renault’s especially. My first visit to Greece as a university student hooked me on modern Greece as well. Since then, I’ve become a professional academic specialising in ancient Greece and have been lucky enough to develop a lifelong relationship with modern as well as ancient Greeks. I lived in Greece for six years in my twenties, and have gone back repeatedly ever since. I’ve published widely on Greece’s ancient history and archaeology.
Tony's book list on travel in Greece, ancient and modern
Why did Tony love this book?
This is a dreamer’s book—notes about life, literature, and the universe written by the author after accepting on the spur of the moment a Greek friend’s invitation to go island-hopping in a little sailing boat.
I like it not just because I knew the author’s late daughter and treasure his affectionate references to her, but also for its erudite musings and reflections. They remind me of how, even from the deck of one of today’s decidedly unromantic ferries, the glinting sea and island silhouettes induce a state of semi-trance or reverie, pushing your thoughts into overdrive.
The author was a heavyweight figure on Greece’s literary scene, but this little book is charming, short, and accessible.
1 author picked Aegean Notebooks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Zissimos Lorenzatos (1915-2004), essayist, thinker and poet, was arguably Greece's most significant man of letters in the twentieth century. In the Aegean Notebooks, a record of his observations and reflections while sailing among the Greek islands in the 1970s and 1980s, the special quality of his literary and philosophical gifts, and of the man himself, are vividly present. Along with everything a mariner yearns to bring ashore, all he has felt and experienced at sea with the wake of the boat unfurling behind him, Lorenzatos brings us in addition a lifetime's learning and contemplation. For him, life, and the living…