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...

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

‘Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, Gabriele d’Annuncio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured and killed.’ The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annuncio, is an unrivalled story of decadence and hedonism requiring, at times, a suspension of disbelief. Death, sadism and eroticism are constant and intertwining themes, to the extent that I wondered, when d’Annuncio urged young Italians into World War 1,

‘”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...

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

I’ve always marvelled at the audacity of the Croatian priesthood pushing to canonize Aloysius Stepinac, knowing the crimes of the WW2...

Some years ago, I was chatting at work with an Arab woman from Egypt when the topic of democracy came up. ‘Arabs can’t do democracy,’ she...

My father was Irish, English and German. My mother had Italian, Venetian, Slovenian and Croatian/Montenegrin grandparents. After World...

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

When I was born in Sydney in 1960, my grandfather, like many Australians his age, called Yugoslavs Balts. Even though Yugoslavia was...

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...

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...

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 -...