Richard Stoneman is an Oxford trained classicist with a thorough knowledge of ancient Greece, its language and history; he has also published many books on modern Greece and is familiar with the sources from the Middle Ages and the modern period. He is the author of A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece, A Traveller's History of Turkey, A luminous Land: Artists Discover Greece. He is a frequent visitor to Greece and gets withdrawal symptoms if he doesn't go to Athens at least once a year.