An Affair of the Heart is one of several books Dilys Powell wrote about Greece. Part memoir, part history and part travelogue, it is written with great emotion but little sentimentality.

While she was at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read modern languages, Dilys Powell met Humfry Payne, and they married in 1926, the same year that he became the Director of the British School at Athens, the archaeological organisation responsible for digs undertaken by the British in Greece. After Powell joined the literary pages of the Sunday Times in 1928, she divided her time between Greece, where she joined her husband on excavations, and London, where she pursued a journalistic career that was to last five decades. For nearly ten years she spent a good deal of time with Humfry at his site at Perachora on the Gulf of Corinth, but after his tragic death in 1936 from a staphylococcus infection

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