The Island That Refused to Die (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9783950626100)

Five thousand years. A dozen conquerors. One island that refused to die.

Long before Rome laid its first stone, the Minoans were raising Europe's oldest palaces on an island at the crossroads of three continents - and so began one of the great survival stories in human history.

From the bull-leapers of Knossos and the undeciphered script of Linear A, through Roman governors and Arab emirs, Venetian merchants and four centuries of Ottoman rule, to the fire and defiance of the Battle of Crete in 1941 - conqueror after conqueror came, and each left something behind: a temple, a word, a recipe, a faith.

Grounded in the sources yet told as a story - vivid, human, and impossible to put down - this is the sweeping, intimate portrait of the Mediterranean's most resilient island.

For readers of Tom Holland, Mary Renault, and Patrick Leigh Fermor.