The glory that is Greece

The country that is now known as Greece is almost totally alien to us; we imagine we understand it because we have been fed on a diet of ancient myths, philosophers, deities and democrats, but Patricia Storace explodes the myth that modern Greece is merely a benign continuation of that glorious past, veering from amusement to exasperation in the process. Her book is both dazzlingly informative - we learn the meaning of surname suffixes such as poulos (child of) and akis (little), that Greek TV news reports still routinely refer to Istanbul as Constantinople, that St An drew the Frying Pan Piercer will make holes in your frying pan if you don't make him pancakes in it on his holy day - and dizzyingly subjective; political and religious fanaticism, manifest in the perennial assertion that the Serbs are innocent victims in Bosnia or the determination to acquire Macedonia at any cost don't seem to bother her unduly, though she expounds at length on way in which violence against women is accepted at all levels of society and a staple ingredient of popular culture.