Phew! Just letting everyone (and everyone’s wife, husband, child, neighbour) know that my first book, The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels through India and China in Search of Tea, is available on Kindle for free this weekend.
The weather looked a bit dodgy, so I thought I’d give the book away instead of doing the garden…
Download it – share it – and if you enjoy it, please don’t forget to leave a review on Amazon…
Back from a whirlwind visit to the city with two new essentials for anyone thinking of travelling to Istanbul. The first is a book, and a website, called Istanbul Eats: Exploring the Culinary Backstreets – a lively canter around the food treats of the city. Lots of my favourites in there, and others I hadn’t taken in – street food, stall food, cubbyholes and restaurants, clearly orgainsed by district. Authors Ansel Mullins and Yigal Schleifer have an infectious enthusiasm for discovering new things, and eating them. Lots of photos, good maps, and all in a book so small you can slide it into your pocket…
The website is at http://istanbuleats.com/
Next essential is Istanbul: The Ultimate Guide by Saffet Emre Tonguç and Pat Yale. These two know their Istanbul like nobody else, and their award-winning new guide is everything it promises to be – thousands of photos, maps, vignettes and snippets of information, taking you into – over and under – everything worth seeing in the wider city.
Both books are available abroad, or you can buy them easily on Istiklal Caddesi, the old Grande Rue de Pera.
In Istanbul, at any rate. So much changes as the years go by: it’s prosperity, of course, which does it – and the corrosive ways of global finance, which encourages people to get rich by trashing things we like.
Now that the Pera Palace has had a facelift, I’m shifting my bags along the road to the Grand Hotel de Londres, partly because the name is so evocative, and partly because it has what some call faded glamour (and others depressing plumbing). It’s here: http://www.londrahotel.net/ Note: they take bookings without taking a credit card number! How’s that for old world politesse?
While we’re at it, are there any places like that which you’d recommend to us all? I can think of some in India, like the Ooty Club; and I remember staying at the Peace Hotel (nee Cathay) in Shanghai, when the old men played jazz downstairs and your room could swallow a London bus. There was a Greek cafe, Makarios, on Jermyn Street in St James’s till a few years back where you could get a dish of mussels for, I think, £4.50; it was full of minor civil servants and the old waiter had a voice like molasses running over gravel. Now, pimped up, overpriced, Italianated and lost, it’s like this:
Still, all is not yet lost – so take a moment to share your nostalgic travel treats with the rest of us, below – if you can squeeze a photo in, so much the better!
Complete joy! I did an event for An Evil Eye, talking about the harem, at the wonderful bookshop in Bath, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. It was rounded off by this appearance from the Bookshop Band… They’ll be on Radio 4’s Today programme this week, too.
Watch and enjoy – and share it with friends: the band deserves it!
As the band said, if Yashim’s adventures were done as a children’s tv programme, this would be the soundtrack.
Over the course of the Istanbul series of Yashim novels it’s inevitable that new readers will begin to discover them in random order – which is why, like JK Rowling, I make sure the characters are re-introduced in each book, subtly enough (I hope) that regular readers won’t be bored.
Here is the Yashim hit-list (linked to Amazon.com) in strict order of appearance:
4. An Evil Eye
A fifth, provisionally entitled The Latin Reader, is currently entertaining me each day…
This is Gentile Bellini’s 1501 Turkish Painter, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston
Setting up a modern online publishing venture is like picking at a loose thread: before you know it you’ve made a hole in the world wide web and all your schedules are unravelling…
Sunita, the glamorous publicity director of Argonaut Books, insisted that The Gunpowder Gardens should have a Facebook page. Then, that the page should be liked by as many people as possible. So if anyone has a minute – and why should you? – please go over to https://www.facebook.com/GunpowderGardens and click Like: apparently it’s an open sesame.
More congenially, I took Yashim’s friend Palewski, the Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, duck shooting this morning. It’s September, barely dawn, just outside Istanbul at the Çekmece Lakes, where the duck comes in from the Crimea… Both lakes have bridges built by the masterly Sinan.
Last year I did some filming with Kensington TV for a series called Museum Secrets, airing on Canada’s History Television channel.
Episode 14, Topkapi palace, is going out today.
Topkapi Palace Museum is peaceful at night. But when the Sultans lived here, it’s likely they had trouble sleeping.
A traitorous vizier, a jealous wife, or an ambitious son – many might have reasons to murder a Sultan. During the Ottoman Empire, 19 Sultans were assassinated.
In the broadcast episode, we meet a man who is an expert in such matters. His name is Jason Goodwin – a detective novelist who sets his stories in Topkapi Palace during the Ottoman Empire.
We follow Jason as he examines murderous possibilities in the Sultan’s bathroom, at Istanbul’s famed spice market, and as he returns to Topkapi to consider the homicidal potential of the Sultan’s kitchen. Here Jason investigates if poison could be secreted into a Sultan’s food.
Is poison the best way to murder a Sultan? Or are other nefarious methods more likely to succeed?
All is revealed in Museum Secrets: Inside Topkapi.
Jason’s detective novels, set in Topkapi Palace, are filled with mystery and history. We invite you to check out a complete list of his works to date on Amazon.com.
Is Amazon a predatory monster monopolising the book trade? Do e-books mean the death of publishing? Are we standing at the edge of a bright new dawn, as readers and writers – or staring into the abyss?
Is it a storm in a teacup?
I have no idea – but I may have a better answer in the months to come. I have just published – with Argonaut Books, whose CEO, staff and publicity director are all me – the Kindle edition of the first book I ever wrote, The Gunpowder Gardens.
Published in the USA as A Time for Tea: Travels in China and India in Search of Tea, it’s a travel book, a history book – and a book about tea. It was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, ran to numerous editions on both sides of the Atlantic, and is now out of print. Until today, at least.
Having proof-read the digital edition myself, I can say that I am still as proud of this book as I was on the day it first came out, with beautiful covers done by my friend Mark Kesteven.
For UK Kindlers: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Gunpowder-Gardens-Time-ebook/dp/B007YANR90/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1335700500&sr=8-4
For more about the book, click this link
Many readers have written to me to say that Yashim’s exploits have inspired them to visit, or re-visit, Istanbul – where the official city guides, as it happens, recommend the Yashim series to prospective tourists, as a gentle introduction to the city’s long and tumultuous story. My thanks to them all.
If any further spur was required, then Cornucopia should provide it. Cornucopia describes itself as ‘the Magazine for Connoisseurs of Turkey’, and it is that and more. It is an astonishingly beautiful magazine, published quarterly, with features on everything from old Bosphorus interiors to nomads of the steppe, from attar of roses to neolithic Anatolia, very lavishly illustrated, as the brochures would say, and intelligently written.
One way to look at what it has to offer is via this link, which begins with a review of the Yashim books by Barnaby Rogerson, author and publisher at Eland Books – of whom, and of which, more in a later post.
http://www.cornucopia.net/store/books/an-evil-eye/
A browse through the website to begin with is highly recommended!
Celebrating and chronicling all things Ottoman-inspired and influenced, Cornucopia is a cross between World of Interiors and National Geographic, with a gentle Turkic twist. Tyler Brülé, The Financial Times
Speaking of orientalists (see previous blog), Sotheby’s have a sale of Orientalist paintings on April 24th in London. The link is at the end of this post.
The star of the sale, to my mind, is Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Scholar: it could be Yashim’s young friend Kadri, from An Evil Eye, continuing his studies.
The estimate is £5 million.
If it’s too short notice to free up that amount, why not John Frederick Lewis’s A Halt in the Desert?
Lewis was not the first English artist to go East, but he was unusual in settling in Cairo for ten years from 1840, where he quietly worked on his sketch books. The British were about to fall in love with the Middle East. For one thing it was actually quite easy to go there by the 1840s, so that the sort of journeys which Byron had made so much of became almost everyday. David Wilkie, it’s true, didn’t make it home: his death aboard ship was commemorated in Turner’s Peace – Burial at Sea. Richard Dadd came home only to murder his own dad, afterwards pursuing his career inside Broadmoor; but others – like David Roberts – managed to lash themselves around the sites in short order. Even Edward Lear was able to roam from Albania to Petra (‘striped ham’, he noted) and get home safely. There is a good Lear in the sale, too. By the 1860s you could visit Palmyra with Thomas Cook.
Travellers by then could contrast the warmth and personality-based governance of the Ottomans with the repressive machinery of centralised government represented by Russia. After fighting the Ottomans in the cause of Greek independence, the British (and the French) tried to prop up the Sick Man by any possible means; British forces saw off an Egyptian incursion into the sultan’s dominions in 1840 (see An Evil Eye) and, famously, fought alongside the forces of the Sultan in the Crimea; some historians go so far as to describe the Ottoman Empire as a British protectorate in all but name. Echoing the spirit of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s observations in the previous century, some observers compared eastern freedoms favourably with the industrial slavery of Victorian England.
Lewis was not alone in trying to convey the dignity of Ottoman civilisation, partly by his emphasis on craftsmanship over soulless machine products (although by the 1840s, Europeans were unwittingly cooing over Manchester cottons on sale in the bazaars of Constantinople, fully in the belief that they had stumbled over a cache of exquisite native prints). There was a receptive audience for this stuff at home. Thackeray wrote: ‘There is a fortune to be made by painters in Cairo…I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life, of picturesqueness, of brilliant colour, of light and shade. There is a picture in every street, and at every bazaar stall.’ Lewis, whom he championed, really did it best: he may have recycled the same stuff for 25 years after he came home, even trying the patience of Ruskin, who had first encouraged him into oils, but he did it with a shy sense of irony.
Both in The Carpet Seller and in Interior of a Mosque, Afternoon Prayer (The ‘Asr) he renders a disguised self-portrait, once as the carpet dealer, the other as an old military man about to pray, which seem to exude a private yearning for fellowship with a world he could, when all is said and done, only watch from the outside. I like this one, A Harem Scene, Cairo, for the detail:
Lewis and his wife had no children. They never went out to parties, he wrote very few letters, and after all the apparent excitement of Cairene life he seems to have lived a life of quiet and blameless activity with his brushes in Walton-on-Thames, part of which, I am sure, can be glimpsed out of the window of his harem picture. His wife modelled for some of the decorous odalisques. Called upon to speak after dinner at a gathering of watercolourists, he apparently gazed silently at the ceiling and then sat down.
Not many painters do so well.