... although it is seemingly set in 17th-century Istanbul, it actually portrays a never-land of the collective imagination

… we are kept quite on tenterhooks as we follow our hero, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, on his erudite tour through the Arabic and Turkish speaking lands of Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Oman, Turkey and Crimea.

Editing the glories of Anatolia down to just 83 entries is itself a labour of Hercules, but Russell quickly earns your respect by his eye for the telling detail, his love of nature, for taking the hard path ...

… the heart of the matter is that Melchior Lorck deserves the five-volume treatment because he is the first famous Danish artist.

Whether Mehmet is to be assessed as a battlefield commander, a strategist, a diplomat or a monumental builder of cities, there are very few men who can equal his achievement.

… although the reader is utterly caught up in the devilish intricacies of the multi-layered plot, you are left with a complex picture of Istanbul and its deeply grained history.

At its simplest level, it is a burlesque adventure, where a well-meaning amateur English adventurer blunders his way through a totally impractical project

A chronological tale of the First World War might be wearyingly familiar, but by telling it from the perspective of the Ottoman Empire, Eugene Rogan grabs the reader’s attention – as if we are hearing the Iliad from the Trojan battlements.

Caria might look just a small province within the national frontiers of Turkey, but under this sort of close attention to detail it expands to become a cultural universe of its own.