Affair of the Heart, An

Dilys Powell’s love affair with Greece and the Greeks began on a sun-baked archaeological dig in 1931. Joining her husband, the archaeologist Humfry Payne, on the remote peninsula of Pearchora, she came to know the villagers who laboured on the site, camping beside them year after year, for months at a time.

Despite personal tragedy, occupation and civil war, Powell’s affair of the heart continued. She returned time and again through the “40s and "50s, and with each visit there was a reconciliation with her idyllic memories, despite the changing reality of Greece. Both with Humfry and without, she explored remote mountains in the company of shepherds, isolated stretches of coast and island with local fishermen and olive-dotted hillsides with their subsistence farmers.

‘Powell has dug so deep into the Greek character that she has written something of a permanent and useful value…a work which, in its genre and at its scale, comes within sight of perfection.’ - John Freeman, New Statesman

‘A beautiful, exquisitely moving book. Every page is completely suffused in the sense of Greece, of the land and people, in town and countryside.’ - John Connell, Evening News