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“... writing formally adventurous, learned novels about the passionate collision of East and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny. His eight ...”

“... of uncomplaining complaint’. De Bernières also names several chapters after their narrators, as Orhan Pamuk does in My Name Is Red (2001): ‘I am Philothei’, ‘I am Ayse’, ‘I am Ibrahim’, ‘I am Karatavuk’. He throws in a soldier called Orhan and a cat called ...”

“... with the life of Istanbul streets, but it is also a looking-glass novel of stories within stories. Pamuk’s city is both an Aladdin’s Cave full of glittering signifiers, and an echo-chamber where, wandering in disguise like Haroun-al-Raschid, the searcher encounters phantoms of himself. Galip comes across other devotees of Jelal’s newspaper column – a ...”

“... Be yourself,’ a beautiful woman called Ipek says to Ka, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s newly translated novel, Snow (Kar, 2002), when he asks how to win her heart. Though kindly meant, it’s discouraging advice to give one of Pamuk’s characters, for whom being themselves is difficult ...”

“... a writer being ‘hammered by’ Matisse, of Thelma and Louise striking ‘a nerve’, of Orhan Pamuk feeling his ‘body sever itself’ on reading a book’s opening page, of a filmgoer being ‘knocked backward by a sound’. She wants to shape a more ‘robust and refined’ language of attachment, but the emphasis is perhaps too much on ...”

“... was a lot of furniture, which had come with the apartment.It wasn’t long before I heard that Orhan Pamuk was in town, building a museum. The museum was said to be full of stuff that had ‘belonged’ to the protagonists of his last novel, The Museum of Innocence. If you knocked on the door, he would let you in and show you the heroine’s old ...”

“... in effect, misjudgments, failures of statesmanship, perhaps. These are not hypothetical arguments. Orhan Pamuk was until recently awaiting trial for affirming the existence of an Armenian genocide, while the president of Iran has cast doubt on the Holocaust, and floated the idea of relocating the state of Israel in Central Europe. Mann and Levene both see ...”

“... a by-product of successful capitalism, and of a globalised aesthetic that prizes writers who, like Orhan Pamuk, Ma Jian and Haruki Murakami, are thought to have transcended local issues and acquired a ‘universal relevance’.It’s hard not to share the derision, once the victim has been so tendentiously trussed. Who could possibly approve of this ...”

“... respects a livelier radical milieu than London, Paris or Berlin. This is the setting out of which Orhan Pamuk – not exempt from friendly criticism in it – along with other leading Turkish writers, comes. If there is a blind spot in the outlook of this intellectual left, it is Cyprus, about which few know much and most say less. But on the other two ...”