Few moments in the annals of derring-do will surpass the one at the opening of John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916) when Sir Walter Bullivant explains the Ottoman side of the Great War to Richard Hannay:

You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver, and a collection of Jews and gypsies should have got control of a proud race. The ordinary man will tell you that it was German organization backed up with German money and German arms. You will inquire again how, since Turkey is primarily a religious power, Islam has played so small a part in it all. The Sheikh-ul-Islam is neglected, and though the Kaiser proclaims a Holy War and calls himself Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo, and says the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet, that seems to have fallen pretty flat. The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet—I don’t know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number … There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark.

Sean McMeekin is a professional historian with a deft popular touch, based at a modern Turkish university, and he is careful to salt his engrossing and enlightening narrative with frequent allusions to this famous thriller, which after all contains the most that many people know about the First World War’s forgotten front. He gently corrects Sir Walter’s deranged diagnosis of Enver Pasha and the “Young Turk” revolution he led in 1908, while pointing out that it was in fact the actual view of the British Foreign Office. According to the two most senior of His Majesty’s diplomats in Constantinople, Gerard Lowther and Gerald Fitzmaurice, Enver and his associates were rooted in crypto-Jewish Freemasonry, with its adeptness at “manipulating occult forces,” and modeled themselves on “the French Revolution and its godless and levelling methods.”...