Philip Sherrard

From the back cover: Philip Sherrard (1922-1995) was an English polymath who spent much of his life in Greece. Poet, historian, philosopher and theologian, he drew on Greece and its culture to shape a radical critique of the contemporary West. Orthodox from his thirties, he addressed the failure of Western Christianity to provide a spiritual foundation for its world. A historian at St Antony's College, Oxford, and then at King's College, London, he stressed the human force of tradition and its power in Greek culture through the Byzantine period to the present. As a leading translator of modern Greek poetry, he helped to make the work of the Nobel Prize winners George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis available to the wider world. In his later years Sherrard wrote passionately against the exploitation and destruction of nature. In 1959 he bought a former mining site at Katounia on the island of Evia and gradually restored it to its natural beauty. It became a rich centre of thought and creativity, where friends, including Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Tavener, came to visit, work and stay. This book is a study of his ideas.

"A fine piece of work, and good introduction to Sherrard's thought for the general reader." Archpriest Andrew Louth, Professor Emeritus of Patristic and Byzantine Studies, University of Durham