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Norman Stone rss

Norman-Stone

A letter from Turkey

15 December 2012

My Turkish never having got beyond intermediate, I always have the same conversation with taxi drivers. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘England, actually I’m a Scotsman,’ I say. Cue suppressed giggles… Read more

Grass-roots takeover: Hungarian boy scouts parade on May Day with banners depicting Stalin and Rákosi c. 1950

Blackmail, bribery and bullying

6 October 2012
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56 Anne Applebaum

Allen Lane, pp.614, £25, ISBN: 9780713998689

You can always tease Hungarians if you say that they have more Nobel Prize-winners than the Japanese, and that that really remarkable statistic is the abnormally high percentage of non-Jews… Read more

Norman Stone

19 May 2010

The last election in which I voted was that of 1997. On Blair’s brave glad morning I flew to Edinburgh for something, and as we touched down the intercom said,… Read more

My dream for Turkey, by Boris’s great-grandfather

23 April 2008

Norman Stone on the dramatic life and death of Ali Kemal, one-time interior minister of Turkey and our mayoral candidate’s forebear Boris Johnson is one eighth Turkish. His great-grandfather (there… Read more

Norman Stone

14 November 2007

Istanbul I had a medical in Ankara not long ago. The doctor was a good sort, looked over her spectacles and read out the list: blood pressure all right, weight… Read more

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Turkey is right to fight for an end to the PKK

24 October 2007

Istanbul Turkey at the moment is being swept by a great wave of patriotic rage. In the past several weeks a dozen or more young soldiers have been killed in… Read more

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What has this ‘genocide’ to do with Congress?

17 October 2007

Istanbul Two elderly shoe-shiners were shouting with rage outside my local in Istanbul. The subject was America, and they ranted on and on — first about the disaster in Iraq,… Read more

A man, a plan, a canal . . .

3 July 2004
Nasser: The Last Arab Said K. Aburish

Duckworth, pp.342, 20

Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He brought out the full horror of… Read more