This book is about me. It may sound an alarming admission but is one that most authors could make, and I promise you that the book is no autobiography. It is about me in the sense that it reflects my personal and professional curiosity about the past and present of foreign lands, especially those of southeastern Europe and western Asia. Having lived in the Balkans, Turkey, and the Arab Middle East, I have been long fascinated by the politics of these areas. Much of that fascination has derived from the strength of feeling about ideas and identities that people with whom I had contact so clearly had: nationalism was always most evident, but other emotional attachments, from godless communism to God-fearing faith, were either more sporadically or more quietly shown. My basic reasons for being in those countries, however, were professional, and I should explain a little about my career in order to make my point of view easier to understand. I am a lecturer in contemporary history at Birkbeck, University of London. My teaching is weighted toward the post-1918 – and indeed contemporary – period, but my research interests lie in the history of the Ottoman empire (c. 1301–1922). Before coming to Birkbeck, I had some interesting years as a “Turkish nationalist” and sometime “agent working with the Turkish National Intelligence Service” (MIT).