Athens

From Pheidias’ Parthenon to Calatrava’s Olympic Stadium, Bruce Clark has pulled off a stunning retrospect and beautifully written overview of one of the world’s greatest cities. Athenophiles of all ages and stripes will find in Athens a cornucopia of city-related treasures – Paul CartledgeA magnificent tour de force, drawing on the testimony of eye-witnesses across a span of 2,500 years. Bruce Clark brings an eye for the quirky, human detail, a pithy turn of phrase, and an affection for his subject honed over many decades – Roderick BeatonA remarkable achievement. Courageously grand in scale yet sensitive to the details that make Athens’s extraordinary history come alive, right up to the present day – Sofka ZinovieffBruce Clark’s enchantingly readable history revealed how little I knew and, perhaps more importantly, how little I knew of the ways it all fits together * Literary Review *A classic journalistic and academic analysis of the ancient and the modern * Irish News *An exhaustive yet compelling history of the Greek capital… Unmissable and highly informative * Financial Times *A triumph of a book that should be read by those who already know this city’s importance and charm and those who want to. It is an extraordinary achievement * Economist *A comfortable, entertaining read which glides seamlessly from one chapter to the next * Kathimerini *

Bruce Clark writes on culture and religion for The Economist. He has been diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Times, Moscow correspondent for The Times, and Athens correspondent for Reuters. He is the author of An Empire’s New Clothes (1995), an exploration of the rise of nationalism in post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, and Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, a history of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey which took place in the early 1920s following the Treaty of Lausanne. Twice a Stranger won the Runciman Award in 2007.