David McDowall

David McDowall’s A Modern History of the Kurds is published by Tauris. His recent visit to Turkey was made under the auspices of the Kurdish Human Rights Project.

Letter
Jonathan Meades provides an eloquent excoriation of the gruesome architecture for which Surrey is now notorious (LRB, 23 May). Yet he doesn’t question why it was a sitting duck for so many ersatz and egregious buildings. Meades quotes William Cobbett’s distaste for its ‘furzy hills and sandy trails’. Cobbett was a native, ‘bred at the plough-tail’, well acquainted with back-breaking...
Letter

What Not to Wear

10 March 2022

Simon Akam quotes from the directive to Sandhurst officer cadets regarding the wearing of mufti that ‘“jean cut” trousers are not to be worn as a replacement for chinos’ and horizontal pocket openings or press studs remain anathema (LRB, 10 March). That had me reaching for Customs of the Army 1956, a pamphlet issued to me at Sandhurst in 1963 which I never bothered to read. It states:An officer...

Diary: In Diyarbakir

David McDowall, 20 February 1997

The principal city of Turkish Kurdistan is Diyarbakir, a bustling place that in the last fifty years has overflowed its magnificently forbidding basalt walls. These dramatic fortifications – built following the town’s capture by the great Saljuq Malik Shah in 1088 – remain uncluttered and defiant on the southern side: their dark ramparts can be seen from miles away. I remember driving to Diyarbakir as a student in 1967, when the walls were still visible on every side. In those days it held 100,000 inhabitants, of whom only a small minority lived in the new apartment blocks outside the old city. Visitors were rare: the whole eastern region of Anatolia had been closed to foreigners for the preceding three decades.’

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