On August 20, 1968, tens of thousands of Soviet and East European ground and air forces moved into Czechoslovakia and occupied the country in an attempt to end the “Prague Spring” reforms and restore an orthodox Communist regime. The...
What makes a Stalin? Was he illegitimate? Was his mother whore or saint? Was Stalin a Tsarist agent or Lenin’s chief gangster? Was his most notorious heist planned during his stay in London? Was he to blame for his wife’s death? If he really...
Latin poetry begins where almost all poetry begins—in the rude ceremonial of a primitive people placating an unknown and dreaded spiritual world. The earliest fragments are priestly incantations. In one of these fragments the Salii placate...
This book is a detailed reference of the twentieth century struggles that were waged across and beyond the decaying Russian Empire at the end of the First World War, as tsarism and democratic alternatives to it collapsed and the world's first...
In September 2016 it will be 60 years since the first British mushroom cloud rose above the plain at Maralinga in South Australia. The atomic weapons test series wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities and turned the land into a radioactive...
On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a...
We live our lives immersed in name brand products. It’s hard to drive down the street without seeing a plethora of chain restaurants, car dealerships, branded clothing they’re all around us. What most of us don’t know is that the origins of...
Few growing up in the aftermath of World War II will ever forget the horrifying reports that Nazi concentration camp doctors had removed the skin of prisoners to makes common, everyday lampshades. In The Lampshade, bestselling journalist Mark...