William Armstrong
Talking Turkey
Turkish Awakening: A Personal Discovery of Modern Turkey
By Alev Scott
Faber & Faber 311pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Ten or fifteen years ago, a title like this probably wouldn’t have appeared. The idea of Faber publishing a book on Turkey for a general audience only makes sense after a decade during which the country has risen steadily in international visibility and is now the focus of considerable political, economic and cultural attention. Alev Scott is a British Turk whose heritage drew her back to Istanbul after graduating from university in 2009. She lives and teaches in the city and has written on Turkey over the last few years. Her rather broad intention in Turkish Awakening is ‘to understand what it means to be Turkish’. Tackling such a complex country is difficult in 300 pages, but Scott is a likeable guide, able to provide a nugget of interest on every page for the outsider and food for thought for the more wizened Turkey-watcher.
Scott uses twelve chapters to cover the most knotty social and political issues facing the country, drawing heavily on her travels and intuitions. She has something of interest to say on almost everything she addresses: Turkey’s perennial division between the secular and the religious, the troubled education system, the position
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger