About
David Tonge is a journalist and writer who has spent most of his life in Greece and Turkey. He was the BBC, Guardian and Observer correspondent in Athens during the Colonels’ dictatorship, being banned three times for his reporting. He was later Diplomatic Correspondent of the Financial Times. He wrote on the Soviet Union during its final years.
His course thus moved in parallel with the subject of his biography, The Kremlin’s Confidant: How a British Naval Officer Suspended the Cold War. He has also written The Enduring Hold of Islam in Turkey: The Revival of the Religious Orders and the Rise of Erdogan.
He has spent a decade enthralled in opera and far longer wandering the forests of the world. He has built two gardens in Turkey, one beside an olive farm which taught him how high wild boar can jump - and how no dog, however big, seems to want anything to do with them.
He was a scholar at Magdalene College, Cambridge where he studied a hotchpotch of natural sciences and economics. He first travelled to Turkey for the Economist Intelligence Unit, living in İstanbul when the streets were cobbled, the houses of wood, streets gas lit and there was no Bosphorus Bridge. After seven years in Greece, he spent five in London, in his spare time there dealing with the vagaries of local politics. He then set up a consultancy company in İstanbul which helped many foreign companies enter Turkey and a smaller number of Turkish companies reach abroad. For many years, he published Doing Business in Turkey, until admitting defeat to the photocopying industry. His publication Turkey: Route to the Soviet Union coincided with the collapse of the latter.
He was country vice president of the International Dendrological Society for Turkey from 2010 to 2015.
He has downloaded over 200 pages of The Guardian's food writers' recipes and done his best to emulate them, learning to distrust their indicated preparation times.
* His books appear under the name David S. Tonge, lest he be thought to be claiming credit for The Lincolnshire Poacher, published by another David Tonge in 2021.