Book Description

Doros Alastos, penname of Evdoros Joannides (1910-1978), was an important and prolific Cypriot author and progressive political activist in Great Britain, where he lived in self-exile from Cyprus from the 1930s to his death in 1978. Alastos was primarily known thanks to his political writings, which included works on Eleftherios Venizelos, the history of Cyprus, the anticolonial liberation struggle in Cyprus and many other books and pamphlets. In his unpublished papers, Alastos’s son Professor Paul Joannides of the University of Cambridge, discovered a complete history of the British Empire, written towards the end of the 1930s. This important unpublished typescript of 410 pages was made available for inclusion in the series Sources of Cypriot Learning and History of the Institute of Historical Research/NHRF. It is published as Annex 1 of the series because it does not fit into the chronological limits of the collection, which publishes works by Cypriot authors and sources and studies on the history of early modern Cyprus. Doros Alastos’s work, nevertheless, appears to be moved by the same spirit of reflectiveness shown by the Cypriot diaspora authors of the early modern period on the fortunes of their native island and thus it fits perfectly into the collection on Cypriot Learning and History.