Letting The Right Ones In
'How hospitable will Germans be now that travel restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians have been lifted?'
A Borderland on the Edge
The West still sees Ukraine through Russia's eyes
Moscow: Putin’s Empire Strikes Out
Russians cling to the idea of being a great power, even though the quest for empire has become illusory and self-destructive. Can a new generation change this?
The Russians Are Coming
'Like everyone else in Kiev my friend has been having nightmares'
Genius from the Bike Factory
Albin Planinc, the tragic Slovenian
Tajikistan: In Search of the Yeti
'The Tajiks are unnervingly friendly. They take the Islamic injunction of hospitality with grave seriousness. The hungry often sacrifice their only cow for a backpacker with a camera, and the regime has
Bearhugged by Uncle Vlad
Germany's fawning attitude towards Putin stems from a belief that Russia is the nearest thing it has to a colony
A Foreign Affair: David Bowie in Berlin
Haunted by Isherwood's shade, the British musician flirted with fascism, then became a hero to the youth of the communist East
Prague: Diary
‘The post-1989 temptation in Prague has been two-fold. The first has been to legislate the totalitarian past out of existence, the second has been to copy the liberal West blindly at a
Latvia’s Lost World
Jean-Paul Kaufmann's A Journey to Nowhere recounts how a student love affair led him to discover Courland, the Latvian peninsula with a troubled history and elusive identity
Judit and Holofernes
In a male dominated game it was an 15-year-old girl who became the youngest ever grandmaster. She is now chess's finest female player
Joyful Dissonance
With her husband Robert, Sonia Delaunay was a pioneer of early 20th-century abstraction