Yashar Kemal writes of timeless things, the gin of the soul, so to speak, such as the plight of nomads in Central Turkey Today, or yesterday, or at any time you care to mention, it seems, always excepting 'their Glorious Past' and if that turns out to have been two weeks of pillaging at the end of the eighteenth century it was enough to give them a disastrous sense of history. One wonders whether they would make more headway if the Plight were to be built into their overall world view. Both the Irish and the Jews have scored notable successes with this approach. For a start it has given them a wonderful sense of humour which, on the evidence of The Legend of the Thousand Bulls, is something in very short supply among the nomads of Central Turkey. Like most primitives they have an overdeveloped sense of...