The deposition in 1862 of the Russophile King Otto Wittelsbach, and his replacement by the Anglophile George Glücksberg, were managed under British influence. In the following decade Britain took de facto control of Cyprus, which it retained for nearly a century, formalised after the First World War, and maintains in attenuated form through its extant military bases on the island. The abdication of King Constantine in 1917 (when he leant towards Germany), and his reinstatement in 1920 (when he was willing to invade Soviet-inclined Turkey and the Soviet Union itself), were both managed under British influence. In the Second World War, the British first helped the Greeks to eject the Italians and Germans, then helped the monarchists to win the subsequent civil war. Accordingly, Britain, like the United States, supported the Colonels’ military dictatorship of 1967 to ’74.

This history of dominant relations with Greece is apparent, in one way or another, in the variety of Anglo-Greeks of whom I am aware. My husband’s grandfather, Theodore Stephanides, grew up as an English-speaker in India because his father had married into the Anglo-Greek Ralli family. He therefore had a Raj childhood, in common with the Durrell children whom he was to befriend in the 1930s. His wife, née Mary Alexander, was the daughter of the British consul in Corfu and a Corfiot aristocrat. Lawrence Durrell spent his career in those parts of the British Empire which mapped onto those of ancient Greece: Corfu, Alexandria, Cyprus. The Duke of Edinburgh is a scion of the Greek Glücksbergs, who married back into Queen Victoria’s family. London was the obvious place of refuge for the last King, Constantine II — as it was for my husband and his parents — when all of them variously fled the military dictatorship.