Greece has always had its admirers, though none seems to have cherished the Athenian tavernas, the murderous traffic and the jaded prostitutes, the petty bureaucratic tyrannies, the street noise and the heroic individualists with the irony and detachment of John Lucas. 92 Acharnon Street is a gritty portrait of a dirty city and a wayward country. Yet Lucas’s love for the realities of Greece triumphs -for the Homeric kindness of her people towards strangers, for the pleasures of her tavernas and for the proximity of islands in clear blue water as a refuge from the noise and pollution of her capital city. This is Greece as the Greeks would recognise it, seen through the eyes of a poet.