In the years following the publication of Arnaldo Momigliano’s inaugural lecture on George Grote in 1952, interest in ‘the historian of Greece’ (as Grote was once known) has never waned. For Momigliano, a Jewish exile from Italian fascism writing in the wake of the Second World War, the distinguished Victorian was much more than a pioneering figure in the history of ancient Greek studies; he was one of the first critical historians of the modern type. ‘Grote’, wrote Momigliano, ‘possessed the all-redeeming virtue of the liberal mind. He was determined to understand and respect evidence from whatever part it came; he recognized freedom of speech, tolerance, and compromise as the conditions of civilisation; he respected sentiment, but admired reason.’ He thus represented all that had been imperilled in the West over the preceding three decades.