Over the years Durrell's mania for islands has spawned the pastoral optimism of his Corfu idyll, Prospero's Cell, pessimistic resignation in his portrait of Rhodes, Reflections on a Marine Venus, and an abject disillusion that dominates his Cypriot chronicle, Bitter Lemons. Now he has selected from his experiences of all the Greek islands….

[On] the evidence of the text alone 'islomania', rather than overwhelming its victim in his old age, weakens and ages along with him.

The Greek Islands reveals Durrell as less now of an obsessive than a whimsical fanatic….

Durrell claims to answer two questions to which his tourist-admirers might require answers: what would you have been glad to know when you were on the spot and what would you feel sorry to have missed? On the credit side it is difficult to read the book without feeling that one really is on a journey. The...