20th Century
Postcard From Kaunas
As 2nd cities go Kaunas, seems at least, at first glance, to be a pretty unprepossessing sort of place regardless of whether you arrive by air, road or rail. Arriving by train reveals an industrial [more…]
Soviet Union
20th Century
Communism
Role Reversal
Starting around 1989 the Soviet empire started to crumble. The time period between the forming of NATO in the late 1940’s and the retreat of Russia from Eastern Europe and the eventual collapse of communism [more…]
20th Century
Somalia – Western Economic Colonialism
Somalia’s recent history is also a tale of grave miscalculations made by foreigners in a very foreign land. Knowing nomads happily demonstrated their supremacy and disdain for outsiders, the so-called fruits of civilization were not [more…]
America
The Land Beyond the Khyber
My uncle was, from the end of the war until his death in 1973, Special Correspondent for the Manchester Evening News. I recently came across an article which the paper published in June 1971 in [more…]
Arts
Postcard From Berlin, 1979
Back in the late 1970s, when we were both rising stars in IT in the Ministry of Defence, my friend was posted to Berlin to run the Army’s computer centre there. Being a good mate, [more…]
20th Century
A Barren Shore, Part Two
An even greater slab of armour plate than the one we had stumbled across decades before, stood upright blankly showing its wounds, punched through and scored by shot, rusty red, the memorial to those Finns [more…]
20th Century
A Barren Shore, Part One
This is a personal memoir of several visits to the far north and going realisation of what had always been before my eyes, unseen and recognised. I am not an historian and certainly not of [more…]
20th Century
Hungary 1956; ‘Normalization’ in Budapest
The crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising led to repercussions far beyond the borders of the country itself. In its wake communist fellow travellers were forced to confront the grim realities of Soviet realpolitik, the [more…]