"A visual and aural feast. The best movie ever made about moviemaking. Greece and Brigitte Bardot provide the purest form of seduction; Jack Palance provides the sleaziest. The subtext that explains the title is sexual politics at its most provocative. Every frame of this movie is invigorating. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard and composer Georges Delerue deserve to be canonized. The already anointed Fritz Lang, playing himself, gives the film yet another pleasurable dimension of film truth."

"This delicious novel is part war story, part love story. Set in the beginning of World War II, it tells the story of Italian Captain Antonio Corelli of Mussolini’s Army as they invaded Greece. On the island lives Pelagia, the daughter of a Greek doctor with whom Captain Corelli begins an affair, despite her engagement to a fisherman who is headed to join Greek forces. It is one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read."

"Brenda Chamberlain’s A Rope of Vines. I used to follow her ghost around. She was a writer and painter from Bangor in Wales. I’ve lived in some of her former homes and grew up in the village where she ran a radical printing press in the 1930s. This book is about her time living in Greece and has a particularly disturbing opening paragraph that sets the troubled tone for the rest of her book, and her life for that matter."