The Atlantic and Its Enemies Read Free

train from Glasgow Central Station. The Head Porter at Caius, in a top hat, an ex-sergeant major frequently mistaken for the Master, received you, and then, at 9 a.m. in the Old Schools in Benet Street, you were confronted with an examination, beautifully printed, which read, ‘For translation into French’. The passage would read: ‘choppingly, the blades flashing in the wan sunlight, the queen’s skiff moved through a brisk north-easterly towards the port of Leith (A. Fraser)’. In those days there was an interesting battle between the examiners and the schoolmasters, and I had an enormous advantage, in that I had been taught by the siege-master extraordinary, Christopher Varley, at Glasgow Academy, who had no thoughts at all - he read Balzac for the vocabulary, a siege-engine of some power, which enabled you to turn the tables on the interviewers, who would be lost as you trotted out words such as balivot , or is it baliveau , meaning a tree marked one year to be cut down the next, in English, ‘staddle’. The examiners were wiped out, but, once at Caius, I realized I could not handle literary criticism (admittedly there was some excuse: they expected me to read Gide, to whom ‘hard cheese, old chap’ was indeed the only possible response). I switched to history, and was again very lucky, in that I fell under the control of Neil McKendrick, a teacher of genius. He taught me a version of history which was an updated version of the Whig Interpretation, and I have been struggling ever since to get away from it. I remember my first supervision. I had written some drivel about the Dutch Revolt, as to how the breasts of free men could not be whatever-it-was against Inquisitions and what-not. He said, do not forget that torture can be quite efficient. I am still not sure about the Whig Interpretation of English history. The experience of the 1980s showed that there was a huge amount to be said for the Whig Atlantic, warts and all. The warts are horrible - Michael Jackson and the rest - but the Atlantic won, and is now spreading to, of all places, China. Chinese students are now all over Oxford, learning English. The resurrection of that extraordinary civilization must count as the best thing in the modern world.
    There has been another resurrection: Turkey. I have been teaching there for some fifteen years, and very happily so: my university, Bilkent, a private one, was established a quarter-century ago in the teeth of considerable resistance. Its founder, İhsan Doğramacı, had a very good idea as to what was going wrong with universities in the 1970s. Inflation had been a disaster, and Turkey was one of the centres of the troubles of the 1970s. However, she too is a country with tissue regeneration, and though I was much criticized by left-wing friends for being a sort of monkey in a fez jumping up and down on the Bilkent barrel organ, they now admit that I was right. In the latter part of this book, concerning the 1980s, I have written a good bit about Turkey, because there is much interest in a process that has turned the country into a considerable economic power, with a resonance throughout Eurasia. When the country started off, in 1923, you could not even have a table made, unless by an Armenian carpenter, because the legs wobbled, the Turks not knowing how to warp wood. Now, they make F16s. Today, aged not far from seventy, I still look forward to marching into a class of Turks, the best being excellent, and the others decorative and polite. As ever, I owe much to my Rector, Professor Ali Doğramacı.
    I have a great many other debts of gratitude, a book of this scope needing a great deal of outside support. The London Library is a wonderful institution, and my assistants, Onur Onol and Yasin Yavuz, have been helpful way beyond the line of duty. My agent, Caroline Michel, has been magnificently encouraging, as have Simon Winder at Penguin and Lara Heimert at Basic Books. Rupert Stone, as ever my target reader,