Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Category: Uncategorized
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Remembering the life of Maurice Pope, and his Classicist’s Creed.
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To offer a small antidote to the mutual incomprehension that feeds the conflict between the U.S. and Iran, here’s a favourite chapter from my book Dining with al-Qaeda. In Iran, it’s best for Americans to know that what they see and what they hear is rarely what they’ll get. Especially when it comes to the…
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Having my old Soviet mechanical watch smoothly ticking on my wrist feels like a reunion with an old friend. This one is especially sweet to see back in action. Firstly, it was an inaugural repair job for me by a talented apprentice watchmaker, my nephew-in-law. It is also a gift from the great, late Bill…
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After years of hesitation, in September 2019 we finally started letting out our mountain escape in Olympos, Turkey. What were we waiting for? It’s so nice to know it is being enjoyed, and when I saw our first guest’s feedback on AirBNB I was as happy as when I got my first book review! Five…
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Happy New Year! I’m delighted to share an intriguing and often funny memoir of mid-20th century life, ‘Amateur’, written by my late father Maurice Pope. Just follow this link to a downloadable PDF: https://bitly.com/AmateurByMWMPope My father died in August 2019, and you can see notes on his memorial here. ‘Amateur’ spans pre-war and World War…
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The journey from the best to the worst of days in recent Turkish geopolitics was partly determined by a deteriorating diplomatic context. In this keynote speech for the Dutch Peace Research Foundation’s annual prizes for best new MA theses on peace, I look back on the highs and lows of two decades of change.
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How Brussels is having to get used to conflict as Europe and Middle East seem to be overlap more and more.
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A belated posting of a talk that I did in Istanbul in May, trying to explain in a TED Talks lookalike why after 28 years in Turkey I felt that somehow the country will likely always do better – and more slowly – than its Middle Eastern neighbours. Turkish Review also published a cleaned-up text…
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Originally posted on From the archive: Chapter 17 THE YEZIDI HERESY An Alternative Approach to Military Liberation – We rejoiced at the rising Nile, then it drowned us. — EGYPTIAN PROVERB – Hugh Pope and Sagvan Murad in front of Yezidi shrine Sheikh Adi. Lalish, 2003. A good introduction is an invaluable asset. My fixer, Sagvan…
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In 2011, a book review monthly sent me Michelle Campos’s Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine, asking for 5,000 words on all that it might mean. It set my head spinning, a dense, comprehensive battery of sources writing in 1908-1914, making me feel like I was in the same busy conference as…
Hugh Pope 