The city, Woodsworth discovers, is full of those ready to share his load, from Australian tourists at Gallipoli cursing the bloody Poms, a Berber institutrice in Galata’s Benedictine academy and a venerable family of Armenian architects to an Italian novelist and the editor of Constantinople’s last Greek newspaper. Preferring Istanbul’s resilience and vitality to the decadence and self-consciousness of Alexandria or Venice, he nevertheless closes the trilogy on a note of ambivalence. Can cosmopolis on the Bosphorus survive by its classic expedient of looking in two directions at once? Galata Bridge, linking Europe to Asia, provides him with a ready-made image of the universal conflict between globalisation and cultural identity, one which the Mediterranean’s cosmopolite pluralism may now prove too weak to resolve.

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