The novels of Ismail Kadare, first winner of the Man Booker International Prize for fiction, are preoccupied by exhumation. As an Albanian who lived through the Soviet 1960s, Kadare rejected socialist realism's manufactured sunshine in favour of a more Balkan climate. His novels are labyrinths walled in by misty, treacherous mountains; instead of embracing optimism, he interrogates the past by unburying the dead. Kadare's first memory of literature, he has [...]

The concept of the "Turkish novel", like the Moroccan or the Egyptian novel, is one we accept without question, though it contains the germ of a controversy. The novel, as readers of Cervantes and Dickens understand it, is a European form with roots in the Renaissance, individualism and romanticism, and an awareness of its own fictitiousness. When it is used by a Turkish writer to dramatise the competing claims of [...]

A couple of years ago, I flew to Kiev with my Ukrainian wife and our 18-month-old son. Arriving at Borispol International Airport we steeled ourselves for the extended, Soviet-style entry formalities. Arriving at the terminal building, we were surprised to encounter an official holding up a sign with our name on it. Moments later, having been hurried to the head of the passport queue and waved through customs, we were [...]

Fred, the boxer and central figure in The Half Brother, was born after his mother was raped in the drying loft of her apartment as she hung up her washing on VE Day, 1945. How does he know this, asks his half-brother Barnum. "I've listened. In the backyard. In the loft. There are stories everywhere, Barnum. But no one can say who my father is." These two casual assertions, about [...]

I have never understood the fanatical intensity of critical admiration for the novels of W G Sebald. A fortnight ago I reread the first of his "novels" to be published in English, The Emigrants, then the other three books - Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz - because I wanted to understand why I couldn't believe most of what he wrote. In the process I discovered that what, in [...]

A couple of years ago, I found myself in the northern Serbian town of Subotica. I had travelled north by train from Belgrade, crossing the Danube at Novi Sad by a new steel bridge upstream of the wreckage of the old one, recently smashed by Nato weaponry. It was January; in Subotica it was -12 C, never mind wind-chill factors, and the old centre had something of the ice palace [...]

Throughout February, Quentin Skinner, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge, delivered the Ford's Lectures in British History under the title of "Freedom, Representation and Revolution, 1603-51". In the 17th century, according to Skinner, a particular view of freedom gained ground in England. Our liberty, to be true liberty, must be based on more than our ability to exercise our rights and liberties without interference from a discretionary power. (That, [...]

At about 3am on 15 July 1904, in the sunny spa of Badenweiler, south Germany, Anton Chekhov died of advanced tuberculosis. He was 44. British commemorations of the centenary of his death will be strange, I think, because we have never really understood Chekhov, regarding him as a playwright and tragedian. British theatre is to blame. He is ingrained in the repertoire and, on the British stage, is often impossible [...]

If Karl Marx and Adam Smith were right to believe that science is not a pure enterprise but the reflection of a society's values and outlook, what does its current popularity tell us about society? Not much we didn't know already: that we live in a materialistic culture, that we place our trust in facts and objects rather than ideas and people, that we fear rather than include the irrational [...]

When Pushkin died, from a pistol wound in 1837, he was the most famous man in Russia after the tsar. Every sleigh driver in Petersburg knew his house, next to the Moika canal, and over two days, at the end of January, 10,000 Russians passed through its candlelit hall to pay their respects to the dead poet. Nicholas I's secret police posted agents in the crowd, listening for murmurs of [...]