Turkey
Diary
It’s been a great week for the powerful fantasies of fiction (see more below), but over the weekend no novel…
Slippery slope
Runaway inflation is proving costly for Turkey’s oil wrestlers
Turkey’s grain diplomacy
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is once again using Turkey’s geopolitical position for his own ends, this time dictating grain shipments from…
Nato is no longer ‘brain dead’
Finland and Sweden will be formally invited to join Nato today. Them joining the alliance will bolster Nato’s presence in the…
The odd couple
Israel and Turkey’s tentative alliance
Life in an age of hyperinflation
Istanbul, Turkey On Saturday mornings, Istanbul’s markets and greengrocers are packed with housewives in search of a bargain. Anxious women…
Cold Turkey
Why is Erdogan resisting Nato’s expansion?
Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?
I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an…
The middleman
Can Turkey’s President broker a peace deal?
Turkish drones are transforming the war in Ukraine
Istanbul, Turkey A cheer rings out in a secret command centre. On the screen, another Russian missile launcher has vanished…
Moscow Notebook
Things fall apart. Moscow friends call to say that I have to urgently send my 19-year-old son out of Russia.…
Could Turkey rejoin the West?
Istanbul, Turkey Wherever you go in Istanbul, Atatürk is rarely far away. Portraits of the man who founded the Turkish…
Cold turkey: is a Christmas tradition coming to an end?
When I recently asked younger work friends about the prospect of turkey for Christmas dinner, it was greeted with grim…
How Turkey is fuelling the Belarus-Poland migrant crisis
In the cold, damp forest lining the border between Poland and Belarus, thousands of refugees flown over from the Middle…
What Europe can learn from Greece’s alliance with Israel
In the 21st chapter of his magisterial 1948 history of the Second World War, Winston Churchill began with an arresting…
Quite contrary
This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…
Arab states are fighting back against Turkey’s ‘neo-Ottomanism’
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems determined to reinvent the secular Muslim country he inherited as a sort of Sunni Iranian ‘Mini-Me’:…
An uneasy peace
Armenians don’t want a deal – they want resolution
Erdogan’s game
Why Turkey is severing its links with the West
Med alert
Greece and Turkey are in a battle for hegemony
Beyond belief
It’s a mistake to turn Hagia Sophia back into a mosque
High life
Aristophanes was a comic genius long before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: stop…
Will the impeachment inquiry stuff Donald Trump?
President Trump was talking turkey today. At the White House, he performed a solemn task. He pardoned what he referred…
Riveting and beautifully staged analysis of totalitarianism: Arcola’s #WeAreArrested reviewed
When the RSC does modern drama it usually lays on an ultra-worthy yarn with a huge cast, dozens of fancy…
Portrait of the week: Brexit uncertainty, Turkey in Syria and a Chinese threat
Home Brexit teetered from uncertainty to uncertainty. Parliament had been summoned to sit on Saturday 19 October to debate what…
