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 tone of Durrell's prose and comments stays steadily in tune with the changing scenery as he moves the reader from lush Corfu, through windswept Sporades and the dry sanctity of Delos, to Salamis, Spetsae and Aegina, islands that are little more than Athenian dormitory suburbs. As for telling the tourist what he'd want to know, the book has a cheerful carelessness for strict guidebookish facts….

But after the first few chapters I have to admit that Durrell's ever-protean presence began to get on my nerves. Not only does he try to change his writer's voice as often as he changes ferries, there is also a hard core of Durrellness that remains equally irritatingly unchanged, for instance Durrell the travelling philologist, the chap who tells me that there is something especially indestructible about the Greek language because today's students of modern Greek begin by studying from an ancient attic grammar while it would be impossible for a Greek to learn English from Chaucer. Try learning modern Greek from Hesiod, one yearns to shout back.

An only slightly less disagreeable Durrell persona is that of the travelling mystic….

It would be unfair, however, to leave The Greek Islands without mentioning the few exceptional descriptive passages for which alone this book deserves its present place in the best-seller lists. Durrell can still breathe the most extraordinary life into descriptions of the ordinary people of Greece, from the fatalistic sponge-fishers of Calymnos to Chios's camera-shy monks. And there are places, too, particularly some of the barer rock hunks of the Aegean, which, unlike the plane trees of Cos, benefit from every breath of imposed magic they can get. (p. 52)