Baffled by the Balkans? You could, in an effort to seek partial enlightenment, do worse than plunge into Jason Goodwin's impressionistic swirl of people and places, as intricate as the tiles of Iznik, as full of noise, movement and exotic scents as Istanbul's Egyptian spice market. It takes a while to get on to his wide-ranging wavelength, and if you want a sultan-by-sultan, blow-by-blow account of the Ottoman Empire you should really look elsewhere - but stick with it, for he writes beautifully (what regular historian would remark on the "graceful curves" so central to Ottoman culture, from the mustachios to the scimitars via the architecture?), he has unearthed hundreds of tiny stories out of the arching tale of battles and diplomacy, and he shines a light on many of the puzzling details of contemporary life both in Turkey and in the seething morass that was once known as Yugoslavia. Belgrade, for instance, seems always to have been the abode of extremists, while many of the Turkish socio-political convictions which tend, nowadays, to be attributed to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's republican reforms are demonstrated here to be clearly of Ottoman - or older - origin. Histories of the sultans usually peter out into dismaying disarray, but Goodwin's final chapter, an elegiac essay on - of all things - the dogs of Istanbul, is a masterstroke.
