‘The Picnic’ by Matthew Longo review
The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo explains how Hungary came to play a key role in the collapse of communism.
The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo explains how Hungary came to play a key role in the collapse of communism.
On 16 February 1270, the Livonian Knights were defeated at the Battle of Karuse.
Is it time to say goodbye to Eastern Europe, a world remade so frequently by empires, war and political ideologies that it scarcely stays the same for two generations in a row?
Returning to the communist ‘cage’ of a childhood in Albania.
Belarusian memory of the Second World War once helped legitimise the Lukashenka regime. Now it is undermining it.
What took ten years in Poland took ten days in Czechoslovakia. But, as some Czechs would discover, not all revolutions are equal.
Events in the Baltic States at the end of the First World War had serious long-term consequences.
In November 1918, writes Elizabeth Wiskemann, the first Czechoslovak Republic was founded.
Cecil Parrott describes how the elderly monarch from a Christmas carol was based on the character of a young and vigorous sovereign, assassinated on his birthday by his own brother.