Tito with sailors from the Partisan Navy (used with permission of the publisher) Freivogel and Rastelli's Adriatic Naval War is a treasury of superb naval images drawn from private collections, alongside the best-informed text I have ever read on the topic. The sheer amount of small but important details suggests to me that much of the book was put together from local knowledge and oral history. The gathering together of this information is a credit to its authors, but it was

Amin al-Husseini. Related on the female side to Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, revered by...

‘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...

December 1941: Fleeing the German destruction of Užice in Serbia, Tito and the Partisans crossed the River Drina in winter, climbed the mountains of Bosnia on the other side, and walked through the forests. Bosnia Herzegovina is a very mountainous country. In winter it is snow bound. As someone who has driven through Bosnia in the snow, I have difficulty understanding why the Nazis thought that they could successfully invade the country. Even today, the r

Komiža, Vis - port of the Partisan and Allied fleet September 1943 – Fascist Italy capitulates to the Allies. Nazi Germany invades the...

‘Despite his experiences at Drvar, Tito had not lost his liking for caves,’ wrote Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans. Less than a fortnight after his dramatic rescue from a cave near Drvar in Bosnia during Operation Rösselsprung, Tito installed himself in yet another cave halfway up yet another mountain on the island of Vis, three hours east of Split on the Croatian coast. At this time, Vis remained the only island in the Adriatic unoccup

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....

Hats off to Slovenian author Goran Vojnović! I have just finished reading his best-selling novel Yugoslavia, My Fatherland which he...

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

THE MEETING by Josip Cazi On rainy evenings we used to walk through the muddy factory town beside the Danube, Jelice, my blue-eyed girl -...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two opposing political movements emerged from the fall of the old empires: the extreme right...