Joyful Dissonance
With her husband Robert, Sonia Delaunay was a pioneer of early 20th-century abstraction
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Genius from the Bike Factory
Albin Planinc, the tragic Slovenian
The Russians Are Coming
'Like everyone else in Kiev my friend has been having nightmares'
A Borderland on the Edge
The West still sees Ukraine through Russia's eyes
Letting The Right Ones In
'How hospitable will Germans be now that travel restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians have been lifted?'
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
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
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
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?
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
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