GAVRILO PRINCIP is famous for Gavrila Princip Street in Belgrade, home to my favourite restaurant Zavičaj's, where I have enjoyed three times now the best craft sausage, roast potatoes, cabbage salad, mustard and a memorable house red. GAVRILO PRINCIP is also famous for assassinating, in Sarajevo Bosnia, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and starting World War One. "Assassinate" is too strong a word. I believe he was provoked. The under

‘”On the morning of Palm Sunday, while children slept their innocent sleep and the church bells were ringing for prayer to God, the German aeroplanes without warning let fall a rain of bombs on this historic town”’. So wrote King Peter of Yugoslavia after the bombing of Belgrade 6th April 1941. ‘The King went on to describe the terror of the women and children who were machine-gunned as they fled from their homes by low-flying planes.’ (1) Hitler termed this invasion Operatio

‘You who burned my house and killed my child, who shelters beneath a foreign wing, a traitor who accepts a salary from the enemy! Did you...

Why had I never heard of the Vinča culture centred in Serbia and its developing writing system that predated Cuneiform by 2000 years?...

How many women do you know who commence an historical novel based on their shoe size? Or their head circumference? Or their height? When...

'Truth and memory [are] exceedingly fragile,’ writes Deborah Lipstadt in Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory....

The BALKAN ESSAYS of Hubert Butler The Irish Pages Press, 2016 I bought Hubert Butler’s Balkan Essays specifically to read The Artuković File. Naturally, I finished it first but after I had read everything else, Butler’s effect of understated horror was just as strong. In the restrained style of the scholar, he allows the reader to create his own vision of Croatia during World War 2. The writing is beautiful but unimpassioned, its

IRREGULAR ADVENTURE by Christie Lawrence BOOK REVIEW This absorbing book must rate as the greatest war story never heard of. It is the...

Friday 10th May Greek trains are dreadful. From experience I can tell you that the Hellas Express was not a patch on the Vienna Express...