Monday 13 October 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests


The Liquid Continent: A Mediterranean Trilogy. Volume I: Alexandria

Cities of the coast

Nicholas Woodsworth
Armchair Traveller, 199pp, ££12.99,
Jonathan Keates
Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Jonathan Keates on a trilogy of travel books

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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Peter Mark Adams

May 20th, 2008 7:41am

Galata Bridge only connects Europe to Europe - not to Asia.

Peter, Istanbul

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