Hugh Pope's Reading List

"Against Elections was the first big successful book on sortition. It’s been translated into 25 languages and it’s a fantastic read. When I first read it, days later I still remembered whole pages of it by heart, it’s so well done. In the world of democratic innovation, that book was the one that really lit the fuse for many people. Randomly selected assemblies had previously been held in British Columbia, Ontario and Iceland. But Van Reybrouck’s book followed the fact that he organized the first big one in Belgium in 2010. This was the G1000 . At that point, Belgium had been without a government for more than a year because the parties couldn’t agree on one. So Van Reybrouck’s group invited 1000 randomly selected Belgians to tell the next government what they wanted it to do. Van Reybrouck’s book is inspired by the frustration the Belgians felt with the way their already complicated country had got even more tied up in knots by its election system, but his genius is to make the story universal. He was helped in this by the publishers Imprint Academic , which later also took on my father’s book. The publisher there, Keith Sutherland, began publishing a series of books on sortition and public policy in the early 2000s. Van Reybrouck told me he ordered their books and read them all. So he based his book both on research and the thrilling experience of organizing the G1000. Against Elections is full of that early idealism."

"This book is amazing. It’s really rich in research. What I find fascinating is that Yves Sintomer had never heard or read anything by my father, but chose roughly the same kinds of examples to show how sortition moved through the ages. It’s much more detailed, however. He’s not trying to make it an easy read. He’s trying to make sure that everyone understands what each historical stage of sortition meant at the time and could mean now. Unlike my father, he’s not favoring one use of sortition over another. It’s lots of lists of ways you could think about each phase of sortition. The thing that I really like about The Government of Chance is that it shows how, throughout history, elections and sortition have been mixed at some level. This is all a big spectrum and each country does things differently. I learned an incredible amount from it, because he’s got so many examples and it’s done with such common sense. The Government of Chance came out in February in English. This is going to be the textbook of sortition that people will keep referring back to to know what happened in the past. He’s been working on the topic for 20 years and he goes through all the history. It’s just random selection. The word isn’t well-known, yet, but it’s nice and precise. And it’s not sortation, as was once written in the august publication Politico (sortation just means grouping things together!). Sortition comes from the Latin sores , which originally referred to the bits of parchment that used to have volunteers’ names written on them. It has acquired overtones of fate. The Government of Chance has an excellent discussion of this. Sintomer discusses too what the church thought of sortition as a method—whether it was finding the will of God or getting in the way of the will of God. He shows that sometimes there was a faith-driven justification for sortition. Then there’s a justification for sortition that sees it as a way of sharing things more equally, especially government posts. Even in imperial China, the qualified mandarins, once they’d passed their exams, would be sent to provincial posts by lot. This is something that human beings have done a lot and it’s not from any one particular culture. The jury system is the ultimate example of how sortition has been with us in Britain for 1000 years, even if their use and composition has changed. In Norman times, for instance, they were groups of local experts who adjudicated based on their knowledge. The funny thing is that in the 19th century, juries really took off at the same time as sortition faded from political life. Even so, they weren’t randomly selected from a wide base of the population until the 1960s, actually. Very few court cases now go to a jury trial. It’s around 1%. But it’s still there. It’s very important for major cases. And it’s a wonderful example of how, at least in legal context, when it comes to judgment of facts, English-speaking populations really do trust ordinary people to come to a collective decision. In my father’s book there is a whole chapter explaining the mathematics of juries getting things right. For him, it was a very big inspiration in believing that a randomly selected system could work."

"Like van Reybrouk’s, this is a very easy book to read. Both men are activists and very idealistic. They both run sortition associations. Brett Hennig’s book came about five years later, so it’s a little bit more rounded. It’s pretty radical. Van Reybrouck’s book tends to leave it for people to make up their own minds. Hennig seeks to do without politicians altogether, which is a red line for some in the pro-sortition community. My father certainly was similarly minded, over a long time scale. He doesn’t say it’s going to happen straight away. He says, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly, with everything being done by sortition. In their hearts, that’s what many people in the sortition community would like to see. But they know that there are compromises that have to be made to win over existing establishments. Also, who knows what mix of sortition and elections will work best? We’ve only just started experimenting. Even in ancient Greece the strategoi , the generals of the army, were elected. You didn’t just randomly select your generals to lead you into war. But the negotiations and diplomacy and everything else was done by sortition. Once you get the bug, it’s hard to shake off. Sortition is making a big comeback, at least compared to where it was 10 or 20 years ago. The number of citizen assemblies has grown logarithmically since the first one in 2003, and several hundred have now been convened around the world. It’s considered to work well when you have people from a whole community properly empowered to decide on ‘wicked problems’ which politicians don’t really want to touch, but which society needs solving. So yes, in Ireland it was first same-sex marriages, then abortion. It’s been used for more than 10 major climate assemblies, which is something else that politicians find very difficult to deal with. I was lucky enough to be an official observer at the French assembly on end of life. France bans assisted dying, and in the end 184 citizens answered the government’s summons to discuss if that should change. This was the gold standard of a citizens’ assembly with full state backing, called into existence by the President, addressed by the Prime Minister and the head of the National Assembly. They said, ‘Please find out what we should do. We will listen to you and anything that you say we should do. If we don’t do it, we will explain to you why we haven’t.’ So it was handing quite a lot of deciding power to this assembly. These citizens had never met each other before, but even the first weekend they met they already felt that they reflected the diversity of France. It was an extraordinary feeling to be standing in a room with people who were from all over France and its outre-mer departments, and from all social classes and all levels of education. There was an accidental discussion at one point with the president of the National Assembly about whether politicians or the assembly represented the people, and she replied sharply: ‘the one thing you’ve got to realize is that random selection will never take over government.’ And the whole room went silent as it sank in that she had vocalized something which no one had even thought of, maybe suddenly thinking, ‘Oh! It might one day be like that.’ We’re very far from that at present. But that citizens’ assembly, which recommended lifting the ban on assisted dying under strict conditions, proved a very good way of finding out what ordinary people, given full information, would do at this moment in time. A typical citizens’ assembly goes through four stages. First of all, you choose people randomly by letters of invitation or in the French case, by random phone calls, explaining citizens’ assemblies and the issue to be discussed. Sometimes people do this weird old polling thing, where you go to a street corner, go to the third street on the left and then take the third house on the left (say). There are all kinds of systems for doing it, it’s wonderful. Once you have answers from people – who have filled out forms with information about their location, education level, age, sex, ethnicity and employment – there’s a second round of random selection to make sure that those selected represent the community or population as a whole. The citizens’ assembly then convenes. People get to know each other. The main fuel of this decision-making process is mutual trust. When you’re randomly selected, you just represent yourself. Nobody has to feel that they’re there because they’re a woman or they’re of a particular ethnicity or educational level. You’re there because you’re you. It’s completely by chance that you’re there. No one is up, no one is down. Your view is theoretically equal. The citizens then hear from experts. In the French case, there were 60 people who came to formally talk to them, and possibly another 60 people were informally advising them. The main impression one got as an observer was, ‘My goodness, these experts all have very different opinions about what should be done!’ That was an eye-opener. After reading specially prepared materials and listening to all the experts, the citizens very soon came up to speed and far exceeded my limited understanding of assisted dying because they really studied hard. They really felt empowered. It’s what the sortition experts call best behavior. People feel they’re doing their civic duty and so they really commit. It’s one of the reasons why any one citizens’ assembly is unlikely to work if made permanent. Then it would become a job. People would lose that magical pixie dust that floats in the air when people work together with goodwill to find solutions. “Citizens’ assemblies are a really interesting way to draw the sting of anger, polarization and frustration” Then you have deliberation guided by facilitators. It’s important that facilitators are good, remember what’s been said, make sure that the shy people come forward, and that the loud and aggressive and antisocial ones are kept within normal bounds. In the French end-of-life convention they did superbly. They even had graphic facilitators, drawing cartoons of what everyone was saying in real time. Sometimes they were just brilliant. One dreamed up a ‘decision tree’, helping the citizens to see a framework for how their eventual report would need to be structured. It was complicated to take care of all the eventualities that face the 600,000 French people who die every year, and with an aging population, it will soon be 700,000. The citizens proved equal to the task. A 75% majority emerged that said France should lift its ban on assisted dying and 25% said they were against assisted dying—for various reasons: religious, moral, practical, etc., there were different currents. But everybody who was part of the assembly signed the final document. Even those who opposed assisted dying went on national French television to defend the decision to recommend assisted die saying, ‘I agree with this report, because I could see that most people thought differently, but they took my reservations into account and they are reflected in the report.’ It was remarkable to watch that happen. And I think most people who have taken part in a citizens’ assembly have had the same magic moment of thinking, ‘I can do this.’ It was a real downer when they didn’t have that anymore. In fact, some have to have psychological advice going back to normal life because being engaged felt so good. It was so inspiring to see how human beings are very reasonable if they can trust each other. Of course, it’s early days. This is only the second national citizens’ assembly that France has done. It was done differently from the first one, on climate change adaptation. And I’m sure the third one will have different characteristics as well. There’s a lot of experimentation going on. Citizens’ assemblies still have a lot to prove. I don’t think anybody’s found the perfect format or way of doing it. One of the things that people have the biggest trouble with is how less than 200 randomly chosen people can represent a country. The idea of the sample being representative is very difficult. My father spends a lot of time trying to prove that it is and to show why the time has now come to accept it. We do now have the science to show that sampling works, as well as the fact that randomness can be good. Which is a very post-enlightenment way of thinking. University College London actually did a citizens’ assembly on Brexit in 2017, after the vote. It was along the lines of, ‘OK we’ve saddled ourselves with the feeling that we have to do this Brexit thing now. How do we set about it?’ People got to grips with the material and came to conceptual good sense conclusions. The assembly was completely ignored, unfortunately, because the government wasn’t behind it. There has to be some level of government buy-in. The sortition movement can’t be too anti-politician because the politicians are still in charge. And the population, of course, still wants the politicians to be in charge. There are other exciting things going on in the UK. The Sortition Foundation is trying to latch on to the demands for reform of the House of Lords to see if that could be replaced with a formula that includes a randomly selected body or bodies. Change will come slowly and will have to be managed carefully. You have to have the population going along with you. It has to be properly designed. That is a huge challenge, to convince people that it’s working properly. If it doesn’t work, then people will lose faith in random selection for generations."

"Where Sintomer’s The Government of Chance is dedicated to the history of sortition, Landemore’s Open Democracy is more about the philosophy of it all. Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale, and this is definitely an academic book. But, like other academics working in this field, she spends a great deal of time working with governments, NGOs, facilitating companies on how to make sortition perform well. She also serves on the oversight committees of citizens’ assemblies themselves, so her theoretical work is inspired by broad real-life experience. This included her attending an early citizens’ assembly on constitutional reform in Iceland in the early 2010s, which gets a good chapter. Reading this book gave me a strong sense not just of what Landemore thought but also what diverse currents in the field have said and are thinking too. It is also an important book because its intellectual rigor and being rooted in today’s academic literature means that critics cannot dismiss it as a polemical tract. Any reader will come away with a robust and refreshing new look at the meanings and functions of direct democracy, liquid democracy, legitimacy, representation, political parties and referendums. On top of that, Landemore lays out a proposal for a new “open democracy,” which draws on ancient roots – be they Greek, Viking or Indian – and which rests on five solid principles: participation, deliberation, majoritarian support, representation (ideally through sortition) and transparency. Landemore is careful not to alienate the pro-election establishment, but the book prepares the way for change by laying out the ground for new thinking that elections are not the only viable way to run countries, even large ones; that direct democracy (for instance, more referendums) should not be the main path forward; that people are wrong to think that citizens are unwilling to play their part in this; and that allowing groups of ordinary people to take decisions does not run the risk of mob rule."

"Yes. Andrew Mango has exactly the right background to understand Turkey. He knows the country inside out. He was brought up in Istanbul, speaking several languages, and was the head of the BBC Turkish Service. He’s a great collector of all the memoirs and biographies about what happened to make Atatürk the man that could found the modern state of Turkey. A lot of what the Republic has turned into derives from the decisions taken in that period. The elements that are important are: Firstly, the role of the army as the backbone of the new Turkish state, which we’ve just talked about. Secondly, a very strong positivist ideology that wanted Turkey to catch up with Europe – which in Atatürk’s mind was synonymous with civilisation. The question remains open today whether Turkey wants to join Europe or just be its equal. That’s an eternal question for Turkey, and Mango gives evidence of what Atatürk thought about it. There’s also the question of democratic participation. He isn’t rose-tinted-spectacled about Atatürk at all. He shows how Atatürk crushed opposition after he came to power; he shows how the one-party state worked. If you think about the period, the 20s and 30s, it wasn’t unusual to have authoritarian government. The trouble is that Turkey took a long time to shake it off. It was only at the end of the Cold War that Turkey really started moving away from the Kemalist legacy. What I love about Mango’s book is the detail, and the clarity. He has all the evidence marshalled. You can read the footnotes and find out where everything has come from. It’s so different from Turkish historiography, which is very emotional. The bestselling book in Turkey about that period is called These Crazy Turks . It’s basically novelistic. The reader thinks he’s getting history, but basically it’s a transport of imagination by a quite well-informed writer. Because Mango is so detailed, and gives such weight to first-hand material, you get a really good feeling of how Turkey sees itself, through Atatürk and his friends. People are quite prejudiced about Turkey in the West, especially in Europe. Mango shows how they’d been threatened, and how for about 200 years they were in retreat, until Atatürk picked them up. He chose the highlands of Anatolia as the place where the Turks would take their stand, defended it, got it nailed down in the Treaty of Lausanne and made the country safe for his community. At great cost, of course. The previous decade saw the ancient minorities of Turkey wiped out: the Armenians deported and massacred, the Greeks transported out and also, to some extent, massacred. On the other hand, Turkey was itself invaded by Greeks, Italians, French, British and Russians. It was an absolutely disastrous decade, bloodbaths all around. But at the end of it, Atatürk managed to create a state. It wouldn’t surprise me if 100 years from now, Atatürk was still being revered almost as a prophet, as he is today. He still is very, very important for the Turks. These ideas didn’t come out of the blue. For instance, a few years before Turkey changed its alphabet, there had been a meeting of all the Turkic peoples in Baku, and they’d decided there that they would all have a common Latin alphabet. But he implemented it much earlier, and much more rigorously than the rest of them. People talk about the acquis communautaire : Turkey is gradually taking over bits and pieces of European law as it converges with Europe. Atatürk wrote everything into Turkish law from a whole range of European models: the Italian penal code, the Swiss civil code, German maritime trade rules, and the French concept of secularism. Turkey as a society must have had extraordinary indigestion from this wholesale adoption of all these Western things. But because it was a revolutionary period, and he had such tight control of power, he was able to do it. Today, the idea of going back to Arabic script has almost zero support. But you have to wonder what it must have meant to this old and deep-rooted society that suddenly no one could read anything written before 1928. The literature was all cut off. Only now are people rediscovering it. Some of the most popular TV series now, the sitcoms, are Ottoman. Everyone is busily rediscovering the Ottoman Empire. Atatürk spent a lot of time reviling the Ottoman heritage in order to make the Republic look good, even though he was actually an Ottoman gentleman and officer who had been quite close to some members of the Ottoman royal family. The people who came after him spent quite a lot of time reviling the Ottoman Empire as well. It’s taken 100 years for Turkey to make peace with its past. That’s unfortunate because Turkey lost a lot by not appreciating the good things about the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were quite a tolerant lot. That also comes through in Mango’s book. He shows how the Ottomans tried to maintain the multicultural, multi-ethnic nature of the Empire for much longer than perhaps was realistically possible. Atatürk was a Macedonian from Salonica. He was brought up speaking Turkish, but there may have been some Albanian in his background. The people that came with him to Ankara, his inner coterie, were from Salonica. That’s another interesting aspect of Mango’s book. Very roughly, about a third of the population of Turkey today are muhajir or refugees from the Balkans, the Caucasus, southern Ukraine and Russia, and the old Ottoman holdings in the Arab world. They came and converged on the cities of the Ottoman Empire, often taking the place of the deported and massacred Armenians and Greeks. This was a group of people who wanted to build a new state, who were quite well educated, who wanted to build something new that would be strong enough to stand up to the Europeans. Those were the Kemalists who took power. Then you have the rest. When Atatürk came to power, Turkey’s population was about 80 per cent rural – most of them peasants, struggling, ploughing the land with sticks dragged by oxen. Their lifestyle was very primitive, their knowledge of even their own religion unsophisticated. What’s happened since the 1960s is this huge migration to the cities, and now only 30-40 per cent of the population is rural. Half the population of the country has moved from being peasants to being developing urbanites. This is the basis of the party that took power in 2002: Erdogan and the AKP. They are generally more relaxed, more open-minded, more pragmatic, more willing to deal with foreigners in a trusting way and also more religious. By the time AKP came to power in 2002, the tensions between these two groups almost amounted to a class war. You have people who will not talk to each other from the two sides of this social divide – the old Kemalist urban people, and the nouveau riche, the bourgeoisie that has developed from the newly urbanised rural folk. They’re often quite rich, ready to spend money on clothes, but with a headscarf, because that’s how they’re comfortable. The two sides often can’t stand each other. That goes back to the very beginnings of the Republic. You can find people from the rural AKP side who give lip-service to Atatürk, but in private they’re much more ready to be critical of the Kemalists. In the last general election, the AKP got 47 per cent. According to the opinion polls, they’re not far from that figure – we’ve got an election in June. They’ve given quite good government because it’s easier for them. The country was pretty much sorted out when they came to power in 2002. Turkey had gone through a very bad decade; it was the Kemalists who sorted it out, but in the election it was the AKP that won. They’ve kept it fairly steady as it goes, up until recently. Now it’s a bit more turbulent, but there’s still enough money in the treasury. Especially, the local government of the AKP is pretty effective and much less corrupt than in the old days. If you do have to make contributions, you can see what it’s used for much more easily. But the book on the AKP still hasn’t been written. There is no good book in English on Erdogan or what he’s done. I think it would be quite a scary enterprise to write it. He’s quite thin-skinned. We’ve seen the anger he can have for people who challenge him. There are lots of question marks – those who are close to him have become quite wealthy now. How deeply can anyone pry into this while he’s still in power? You’d have to be brave. You have to be careful how you deal with power in Turkey. As a preliminary judgment, I would say that Erdogan is more of a consolidator than a revolutionary. The real revolutionary was Turgut Özal from 1983-93. He really broke the bonds that had been holding Turkey back."

"That’s exactly right. It’s a very empathetic, straightforward read. It’s short. It gives an insight into the ethnic origins of Turkey today that no one has been talking about until very recently. A lot of Armenians were deported and a lot were massacred, but a lot also stayed behind in Turkish families. This book is about someone discovering, quite unexpectedly, that her grandmother is one of these people. She’s been a good Muslim all her life, because when Armenians joined these families, they became Muslims of Armenian heritage and culture, believing in Islam, but also making Armenian cakes on Armenian religious days. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I have a number of friends who have discovered that their grandmothers were not what anyone thought they were. Muslim in culture and practice, but who had come from a very different place. It’s an aspect of Turkey that no one has wanted to talk about because of the idea that ‘We’re all Turks’ and ‘We’ll only be safe if we’re all the same.’ But suddenly people are discovering that it’s OK to be different. Perhaps we should admit that, in the east of Turkey, a lot of people are of mixed ancestry. The power of this book is the relationship between a granddaughter and a grandmother, and how the story suddenly spilled out. It’s been very well translated by Maureen Freely, which makes it an easy read. (Freely also translates Orhan Pamuk.) Some people have criticised her translations for making it too easy for people to read, but the fact is, she has made a very accessible book of it."

"Orhan Pamuk is one of the best things that Turkey has managed to produce in recent decades. He’s a symbol of someone who has managed to escape from the Turkish context, where there’s an ingrained tendency for emotions to rule the intellect, to be unclear in order to protect your own sloppiness. Orhan Pamuk is very different from this. I remember even back in the early 80s, he was clearly set on winning the Nobel Prize for literature. He did everything possible to make his Turkish experience into something that would be universally recognised as a high point of literature and worthy of a great prize. I think he got it earlier than he expected, possibly because of a political accident, but he managed it. He still sells quite a lot in Turkey, but among the intellectual elite there’s a great jealousy towards him, and petty comments. The reason I am recommending a book not by him, but about him, is that it’s the first book one should read. My criticism of Orhan Pamuk is that he has become so grand that no one edits his books anymore. A book like Snow , which I enjoyed, could have been cut by 20 per cent. He even repeats lines – something a good editor would have caught. OK, he’s very fussy about not being cut, but it’s all a bit wordy. Snow was accessible, but some of his other books, which are deliberately highly intellectual, are too difficult for me. I want a good, quickly digested read. But once I’d read Michael McGaha’s Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk and he’d pointed out what these books are actually about and how you should read them, I wanted to go back and have another go. Translations also make an amazing difference. For instance, the Dutch translation of My Name is Red made it into a bestseller because it was so well done. The same is true with the English translation of Istanbul by Maureen Freely. This is the sort of thing you learn from the McGaha book. Maureen Freely’s translations won the best translation prize in Britain, while her rival, who was the old translator, was panned. But she won a prize for translating another book of Pamuk’s because their intentions were different. The old translator was very American, very precise. She wanted to get everything right and exactly deliver Orhan Pamuk’s words. Maureen Freely, on the other hand, was very intent on making it easy to read. Also, the political context of Orhan Pamuk is very important. You have to understand what a child of privilege he is in Turkey, and what that means about the way he writes. He’s very different from the Nobel Prize winner in Egypt [Naguib Mahfouz], who is very much a man of the people. Yes. He really breaks it down and shows how Orhan Pamuk was bravely speaking out about the issue in a way that was quite edgy for Turkey. On the other hand, Pamuk didn’t say anything deliberately so that he could become a death-threat target and therefore win the Nobel Prize. This is the narrative in conspiracy-minded circles of the Turkish literary elite – that Orhan Pamuk deliberately set out to win the favour of the West by admitting the genocide in order to win the Nobel Prize. Which is clearly not the case. You can tell that from this really good book."

"I’ve been frantically trying to work out which book I would choose for the history of the modern Republic. It’s really hard. Jeremy Seal’s book, A Fez of the Heart , is really readable, but he’s gliding too quickly. He’s not as bad as Tim Kelsey’s Dervish , which is terribly prejudiced. Seal’s book is lightly prejudiced in a British-travel-writer fashion, but I decided it was taking too many liberties with Turkey. There are many journalists who have written modern histories of Turkey: Marvine Howe’s Turkey : A Nation Divided Over Islam ’ s Revival is very nice, as is Chris Morris’s The New Turkey from the BBC. You get very pro-Turkish books like Stephen Kinzer’s Crescent and Star and there are others, like Tim Kelsey’s, that are very critical of Turkey. But I’m not sure any of them quite do justice to the overall subject. Perhaps you’re never going to get a really satisfactory picture of the whole country. It’s extraordinarily diverse. You can stand up almost any theory and make a person believe it, because you will find some evidence to support it. Hmmm. OK, I’ll go with The Turks by David Hotham. It’s from the 60s and 70s, but he gets it, as an outsider. The Turkey of the 2000s has not been written, but a lot of the vectors you can find in this book. It’s from 1972. It’s written about a Turkey that’s just started out on the track that would bring it to negotiations on EU accession, which is an ongoing situation. It’s about why the country wants to be part of the West. He goes through the issues that are more or less eternal in Turkey. You’ll find that all of these books will deal with the Kurds, the Muslim conservatives; some will go as far as to do the Alevis (who are a minority somewhat inspired by Shia ideas), the economy, the rural population. Turkey and Europe, Turkey and the Middle East, the Turkish military, Turkey and Russia/the Cold War. All those themes are eternal and everybody deals with them. And people normally come away with almost the same answer. Turkey is Turkey. You can’t put it in a block; you can’t pin it down; it will always make its own decisions. The old adage that ‘a Turk’s best friend is a Turk’ is uppermost in most people’s minds. There’s not much trust in the outside world. Look at the latest WikiLeaks, about when Turkey is offered negotiations on full membership to the EU. It comes through in December 2004 and WikiLeaks has the reaction of the Dutch, who held the presidency of the EU at that time. The Dutch prime minister is really upset because he’s just offered the same thing to Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, and they’re absolutely delighted, backslapping and hugging each other. The Turks, on the other hand, show no sign of appreciation whatsoever. They’re absolutely po-faced, and then they go back to Ankara and criticise the way the decision was given. David Hotham gets it. It’s a little unfair to choose his book ahead of the others, but I think it’s very interesting to go back to a book written a generation ago and find that actually not much has changed."

"This is by Edmondo de Amicis, an Italian travel writer. He’s an observer; he doesn’t go into philosophical depths about anything. The book is very well translated, so it’s very accessible. The reason I like it is that the late-19th-century, early-20th-century Ottoman Empire shares a lot of commonalities with today. As a society, it was an easy-going place, and Turkey today is much more easy-going than it was. Istanbul at the time was the imperial capital and it was connected to the Balkans, and connected to the Middle East . It was a hub; it was a place that had to be taken into account, it had a sense of destiny. De Amicis has this great description of walking over the Galata Bridge, flows of people from all over the Empire wearing different costumes, and the great heterogeneity of Istanbul. That’s what we have again in Istanbul today. I live on Istiklal Street, which is now a pedestrian precinct, and I’m absolutely astonished at the Tower of Babel of languages that are coming past, five abreast. People are not dressed that differently any more, but you do have this feeling of a huge variety of lifestyles. I still treat Istanbul with some caution, because when I came 23 years ago Turkey was a very proud, end-of-the-road and difficult-to-know place. Now people treat it as a party town, a place where things are happening. De Amicis’s book captures that sense of a very diverse city, a hub with a great regional reach that you can really feel now if you go to Istanbul airport. When you look at the departures board, it’s like reading a map of the Ottoman Empire and all the places in Central Asia and even Africa that the Sublime Porte once connected with. I feel that many of those old connections are coming alive; this book gives you a feel of that. It’s definitely being reassessed. The Turks are reassessing it. So are the Arab countries – especially the Baathist countries. They spent a great deal of energy dissing the Ottoman Empire to try to legitimise their own revolutions that were going to be so different and so new. They’ve given up a bit on that recently. They used to feel that way. They used to feel very resentful of the Turks, and they viewed the Kemalist regime as godless infidels who had stolen one of the Muslim peoples and hammered them unwillingly and unnaturally on to the flank of the Western behemoth. Now you have a completely different view. There are Turkish products everywhere in the Middle East. Turkey is seen as commercially attractive. Turkish sitcoms are now all translated into Arabic and viewed all over the Arabic world. It’s also political. Erdogan has won several completely free elections and proven himself to be a very effective, legitimate leader. He’s clearly independent of the West, speaking critically about Israel and other matters close to Middle Eastern hearts. There is no one in the Middle East who can do that in the same way. Arab societies feel that the pluralism in Turkey, and the commercial dynamism, is something they would like to have. I don’t think anybody wants to become Turkey, but they’re definitely very interested in learning more about the Turkish experience."