As Lord Kinross reported in The Ottoman Centuries, the Italians preferred the enemy they could handle to the one they could not.

The aim was to replace the earlier biography written by Lord Kinross who, though enthusiastic about Atatürk, had not actually been able to read Turkish sources himself.

Lord Kinross, in his book, The Ottoman Centuries, describes the situation before the siege as follows:

Lord Kinross's 33-year-old book is informative and highly readable, but it is based largely on secondhand sources and presents much legend as fact.

However, this was disputed by Lord Kinross in 1966 and by London Canals.

As the historian Lord Kinross notes, "Not only was he a great military campaigner, a man of the sword, as his father and great-grandfather had been before him.

Devoting an entire chapter of his Atatürk's biography to the fire, Lord Kinross argues:

According to Lord Kinross, 8,000 Armenians were massacred in Urfa in 1895.

However, during the 1960s he said privately to a friend, Lord Kinross, "I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap."

Macedonia, according to Lord Kinross, taking up Reed's theme, "was a projection in miniature" of the whole Ottoman Empire.