Imagine: the border with Scotland is closed and your home city of Manchester besieged. Before you know it, you and your family are having to flee to Wales to escape bombs and full-blown civil war. Such is the scenario of …
Will the US learn from Serbia’s mass shootings?
With the glaring exception of the United States, a mass shooting normally sparks a national crisis — one that begins with some desperate, top-down soul-searching before an immediate clampdown on gun ownership. In Canada in 1989, Australia and the UK …
Is Serbia a pro-Putin outpost?
A recent BBC documentary promises to take the British viewer “inside” Serbia, exposing the country’s support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The language is heightened, evoking Cold War ghosts. “There’s something strange happening in Serbia,” the presenter mutters in …
Kosovo and the hubris of Tony Blair
When a civil servant first suggested to Tony Blair that he needed to be aware of the evolving situation in Kosovo, the prime minister’s response was much the same as anyone else’s would have been: “You’d better give me a …
The philosophy of Count Dracula
Those visiting Romania for the first time will often be told that its association with vampires is really an unfair imposition, having mostly to do with Bram Stoker’s invention of a Transylvanian setting for his 1897 novel, Dracula. His tale, …
Putin is following the Bosnia playbook
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is widely seen as drawing the curtain on the era of Western domination that defined the Nineties. Yet the End of History was not a peaceful time: the conflict now raging in Eastern Europe was …