From July to November 1939 Kazantzakis was in England as a guest of the British Council.

Having stayed with Petros Vlastos in Liverpool, he went to a house at Stratford-upon-Avon which was put at his disposal by Joe MacLeod, the American lady who had paid for the publication of the Odyssey. In that house, where Shakespeare’s daughter had once lived, warplanes droned overhead as Kazantzakis wrote the tragedy Julian the Apostate.