A town which does not yet have a road, but where they started building a palace

The city had been ravaged by the war and struck one visitor as a 'disgusting and filthy place'. Two years after Otto's palace had started, a French reporter scoffed: '[New Athens] is a town which does not yet have a road, but where they started building a palace - a sufficiently correct image of a country where they first made a king before they were assured that there was a nation.'

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 443

An instrument of counter-revolution

Near the end of the twentieth century, the so-called right to intervene (later recast as the responsibility to protect) emerged in international diplomacy in connection with humanitarian relief. But it had started out, in the years after 1815, as an instrument of counter-revolution that the representatives of Austria, Russia and Prussia agreed might be needed to preserve the peace.

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 398

When Napoleon's remains were returned to France in 1840, no fewer than fourteen bogus emperors were admitted into care

It is perhaps difficult now to understand the posthumous impact of the French Emperor - what Chateaubriand called the 'despotism of his memory' - or how far and for how long his shadow stretched across Europe. Sightings of him were reported, supposedly accompanied by an astonishing array of troops, across much of Europe for years after. A recent history of French psychiatric institutions reveals that when Napoleon's remains were returned to France in 1840, no fewer than fourteen bogus emperors were admitted into care; there had been others before that and would be more in the following decade.  

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 222-3

The Sultan could count on bringing much larger and better-armed forces into the field

The Greeks were a minority of the population of the Ottoman Empire, comprising perhaps 3 million out of its 23 or 24 million people; only in a few areas - the Morea, the islands of the Aegean and some places north of the Gulf of Corinth - did they predominate. Yet even these figures ail to give a full sense of the imbalance, for whereas the Greeks had no cavalry and found it hard to raise and arm even 15,000-20,000 fighters, the Sultan could count on bringing much larger and better-armed forces into the field.

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 182