PositiveThe Literary Review (UK)Some of this story is familiar, but Beaton salts it with fascinating details which consistently surprise ... Beaton covers bitterly contested historical terrain with flair and an admirable lack of partisanship. He expertly navigates landmines surrounding the Greco-Turkish population exchange, the years of the Metaxas dictatorship and the bloodletting that occurred during the Axis occupation of 1941–4 and subsequent civil war. Beaton reminds his readers that the 1974 war in Cyprus was ‘started by the Greek junta’, even if the Turkish invasion of the north island is what most people remember ... Beaton is scrupulously fair on the most controversial episodes, including Greece’s painful recent headaches over Eurozone debt and austerity. He clearly loves Greece, with all its imperfections and flaws, and he is not afraid to expose them. At times, however, his sympathy for Greece leads to a lack of critical distance. While noting the frequent abuse of the past by Greek politicians, Beaton still takes the Greek national project largely at face value ... Because his aim is to explain how modern Greeks ‘have thought about themselves’, Beaton follows them in downplaying their country’s Ottoman heritage (something that is obvious to anyone who visits Greece today). He might well have asked why modern Greeks and Turks quarrel over whose ‘coffee’ it is and pretend they don’t greatly resemble each other, in spite of shared musical, culinary and social traditions ... Still, these are quibbles. Beaton’s history of modern Greece is 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.
Helen Rappaport
RaveThe Times (UK)July is the centenary of the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children. The story has retained its popular allure, despite being told many times before. Romanoviana has been kept alive by the classical echoes of hubris before the fall and the lurid violence of the murders — several of the Romanov daughters were bayoneted to death...Adding to the drama of the final act was the long build-up. The Romanovs endured 15 months of captivity, grimly awaiting their fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks ... This makes for a gripping narrative, which Helen Rappaport recounts with a light touch in The Race to Save the Romanovs. She has uncovered many missing pieces in the story, from the diplomatic wrangling over the tsar’s fate to a number of \'hare-brained\' rescue schemes hatched by monarchist sympathisers.
