With the same meticulous scholarship and detailed, painstaking research that he devoted to periods of Cypriote history so diverse as those of the Bronze Age, the rule of Byzantium and the mediaeval épopée of the Lusignan Kingdom, the late Sir George Hill has dealt with the three centuries of Ottoman government and the era of British administration which has followed it. In one respect readers of the first three volumes of his monumental History of Cyprus–monumental in much more than their extent–will feel compelled to disagree with their author when in the Preface to the first volume he says, with undue modesty, that it claims to be no more than a compilation. The work is a great deal more than that. For example, in the present volume, which brings the story down to our own day, he has given in the chapter on Enosis the first detailed, scholarly, objective and documented account of this political movement that has been written or even attempted. And in his pursuit of all possible sources of firsthand information he has explored, in connexion with his later chapters, not only the files of our Foreign and Colonial Offices but those of the Quai d'Orsay.

Sir George Hill lived to complete, with his characteristic thoroughness, the last volume of his great work, no mean feat for a man who was about to enter upon his ninth decade.