Late in the novel, no matter where in the world his Byronic gloom takes him, Kemal can’t stop running into Füsun’s mother’s saltshaker. Cairo, Barcelona, New Delhi, Rome: ‘To contemplate how this saltshaker had spread to the farthest reaches of the globe suggested a great mystery, as great as the way migratory birds communicate among themselves, always taking the same routes every year.’ You can imagine Marxist criticism deploring the displacement of birds by saltshakers, condemning the globalisation that enables you to travel halfway around the world only to find the same napkin dispenser sitting on the table. But you can imagine another Marxist criticism glimpsing here some version of the truth that Fredric Jameson said was essentially impossible to convey in the novel: ‘Never has the world been so completely humanised as in industrial times; never has so much of the individual’s environment been the result, not of blind natural forces, but of human history itself.’

Second Opium War

Nazim Hikmet copyright law!

his father, Jack Sassoon, was from Thessaloniki, Greece

Combating Terrorism Center

If the Chinese have their strategic eyes on those other BRICS nations, Dr Zbig remains stuck on the Old World, newly configured. He is now arguing that, for the US to maintain some form of global hegemony, it must bet on an "expanded West". That would mean strengthening the Europeans (especially in energy terms), while embracing Turkey, which he imagines as a template for new Arab democracies, and engaging Russia, politically and economically, in a "strategically sober and prudent fashion".

Tuvan National Orchestra

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