Many readers will have stood on a pathway or stone block at Knossos and wondered what they were looking at. The mundane answer is, one of the first reinforced concrete buildings in Crete. Cathy Gere's answer, taking the words from an essay by T.H. Huxley, is ‘retrospective prophecy’, ‘the apprehension of that which lies out of the sphere of immediate knowledge’ in the deep past (quoted p. 8). The wealthy Englishman Arthur Evans (the son of the early student of prehistory John Evans), who bought, dug out and reconstructed the site in the first three decades of the twentieth century, was its leading exponent. But as this wide-ranging and vivacious book shows, prophecy, ‘seeing’ into the past of Knossos, as the favoured image of ancient civilization, was for a century declaratory of a modernist sensibility.

The book's subject is not the separation of a ‘real’ Knossos from its interpreters – and indeed someone looking for an archaeologist's attempt, by contemporary standards, to salvage knowledge from the site itself will not find it here. It is precisely this study's strength to keep the fact–fiction distinction fluid. This is an essay on the symbolism of Knossos, merging into images of Mycenae and the ancient world generally, in a gallery of modernist writers and artists – the creators of the murals at Knossos; the Gilliérons, father and son; Jane Harrison, who brought Evans's work into contact with academic study of ancient religion; Giorgio de Chirico; the architect who worked at Knossos in the 1920s, Piet de Jong Freud; the American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); and Robert Graves; with a walk-on cast which includes Isadora Duncan, Oswald Spengler, Henry Miller, Lord Dowding and many other wild and wonderful characters. There is a complex flow of influences here. Brooding over it all is the prophet with the walrus moustache, Nietzsche, and the entrepreneurial and egotistical precedent of Heinrich Schliemann and Troy. With such a cast, the story will delight many readers, tying the modernist revulsion with the modern age to the re-enchantment of the past as the desired future. A particularly strong strand was the interpretation of Minoan culture (which Evans named) as pacifist and feminine, devoted to the arts of trade, dance and the mother goddess, not to war. Evans's own turning away from knowledge of military fortifications in Eastern Crete, and his willing embrace of forgeries of goddess figures, are particularly striking elements in the shaping of Knossos as a prelapsarian world. Cathy Gere well steps aside from judging Evans as a character in order to portray the comic and tragic riches of the sensibility which he fed.

The book is eminently readable and draws on a sharply focused knowledge of both the Greek Bronze Age and the lives and personalities – frequently so bizarre the telling threatens to run away with the plot – of Evans and the other creators of ‘Knossos’. I am not sure that the largely unexamined notion of ‘modernism’ (a ‘crisis’ taking ‘the form of an acute anxiety about the relation of the external world with the individual's internal perception’, p. 6) can bear the weight placed on it, and I think that Nietzsche is a good deal more demanding, and tragic, than the biological essentialist portrayed here. That is, there might have been scope for a more persistent questioning of key concepts in the rethinking of moral and aesthetic ‘crisis’ through an imagined past, through self-description as ‘Nietzschean’ and through the metaphors of ‘the mythic method’ (T.S. Eliot's phrase, p. 146), and of what this all means, reflexively, for the author's own relationship with ‘the past’. The conclusion briefly notes the possible parallel between the ‘retrospective prophecy’ reported here and the contemporary fascination with evolutionary stories. For unexplained reasons – though I imagine the thought is of the death camps – it is claimed that ‘in the history of the human sciences, the Second World War represents an epistemic rupture of unprecedented violence’ (p. 189); that surely is wrong, as it is precisely the American psychological and sociological sciences of the interwar years which flourished in Europe as a reaction to ideologically laden barbarism. The material is set, though, in a carefully rendered account of the historical context of Crete, from the time of the brutal wars with Turkish overlords, to the German invasion and to the tourist hordes of modern times. The book will have many delighted and interested readers who will ‘see how the human sciences can convince us not just to believe in, but also to enact across our own lives, a prophetic version of our origins’ (p. 231).