The Greek civil war holds a significant place in the history of twentieth-century Europe for many reasons. Firstly, it was Europe’s bloodiest conflict in the second half of the 1940s; secondly, it marked a turning point in the Cold War; and lastly, it showed how Greece had become an ‘apple of discord’for both American and Soviet involvement in Greek affairs which led to even more complexity in the country’s post-war politics. Yet despite its significance, only a limited number of studies have been carried out on the subject of this era. After the troubled period of the 1950s and 1960s, a time dominated by extreme conservatism, anti-communism and nationalist paroxysms, it was difficult to access material sources and this made it nearly impossible to conduct scholarly research, so that older politically-charged interpretations and accounts went mostly unchallenged. However, in the past two decades a new historiographical current has developed as regards the civil war in Greece and new evaluations and debates have emerged that shed fresh light on conventional supposition.

Britain and the Greek Civil War, 1944–1949 draws upon the author’s doctoral dissertation and provides a welcome addition to studies on that period in Greek history. John Sakkas takes up a novel approach that does not focus solely on Greek politics, whether they are national or local, nor does it centre simply on British policy in Greece.‘On the contrary’, the author states that ‘it deals with the profound impact the Greek question had upon the British public and the labour movement, in particular, from Churchill’s military intervention in December 1944 to the end of the civil war in 1949. The chief aim of this study is to analyse the response of the British people to the official policy in Greece, to relate it to contemporary attitudes and concerns, and to assess the various ways in which the coming of the Cold War affected critics of British foreign policy both in the Labour Party and the trade union movement’(p. 10). Sakkas begins by outlining the main goal of his study and the factors that induced him to choose this specific period. After offering a discussion on public opinion and following the specific course of action for ‘measuring’opinion on ‘political issues’ as suggested by American historian Lee Benson, he adopts it in his own account of British public opinion from December 1944 to October 1949. Sakkas identifies three main types of events, broadly defined as: a) sequences of