Land of warmth, light and antiquity

Victoria Hislop first visited Greece with her mother and sister in 1976, at the age of 17. They spent a week in Athens and then another on the island of Paros. "We had the opportunity to get a taste of the diversity of Greece. On the one hand, the heat and dust of Athens, the wonderful confusion of traffic, people, noise and great monuments. I felt like I was frozen as it all swirled around me," she recalls. "And then we got on the boat, crossed the Aegean and arrived at the tranquility of a Cycladic island, its slow rhythms, clean warm sea and white sand. The beauty of both these aspects of Greece overwhelmed me and had a huge impact on me, perhaps because I hadn't traveled outside the UK at all and the differences between my home country and this place of warmth, light and antiquity with its more outgoing people fascinated me. It was like a magic spell that I never wanted to...