Anniversary meeting,June 24, 1936

The election of the first government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 was a turning point for Turkey. People wanted change. That's what the AKP offered. Their successful economic management has seen Turkey transformed over the last 12 years. Foreign policy initiatives also prospered and relations with a number of neighbours improved.. More recent events have led some commentators to ask whether Turkey is moving forwards or backwards on the democratic path. There are concerns that the Ataturk legacy of a secular state is being slowly eroded by the forces of a conservative democracy and that too much power is now concentrated in the hands of Mr Erdogan. This is the background to the 2013 riots in (westernised) Istanbul. And the situation in the region leaves little room for optimism. The challenge now is to promote the political stability and predictability that will encourage continuing foreign and domestic investment in Turkey and to undertake the further structural reforms essential if Turkey is to rise out of the middle income trap and climb into the group of wealthier nations.     

PROSPECTS FOR BRITISH BUSINESS IN ASIA

This article reflects his address to members of the Society on 12 November 2007.     

Palestine under the mandate

Asia's First Modern Revolution: Mongolia Proclaims Its Independence in 1911. Urgunge Onon and Derek Pritchatt. Leiden, E. J. Brill. 1990. Pp. 203, Appendices, Gloss. Bibliog. Notes, Index, Map. $59.00.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.