‘A classic’ Alan Bennett says, ‘is a book that everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have’. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, a long, stream-of-consciousness narrative about the upper middle classes languishing by the shores of the Bosphorus, getting entangled in futile love affairs, contributing a sense of unease rather than progressive zeal to the early republican Zeitgeist, has long been seen as such a classic.