The Sound of Music won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1965, and picked up another four: Best Director (Robert Wise), Best Music (Irwin Kostal), Best Sound Recording and Best Film Editing. Doctor Zhivago also won five Oscars that year, beating The Sound of Music for three of them.

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So, this is my story about the late great Albert Rohan, whose passing was announced today. He was 83.

I got to know him in the 1999-2009 period, from when I first arrived in Brussels as a thinktanker on Balkan issues up to his time as Marti Ahtisaari's deputy in the Kosovo final status process. We saw each other often at conferences and I enjoyed ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: The journey was very long and we had to travel for two days and nights. Sister Firmina, who acted as the boarders’ ‘mother’, had told us to be good girls and not give any trouble to our dear Uncle Hermann, Papa’s youngest brother, who still lived with Grandmother and who would take us from Vienna to Uj-Moldova. ( Read more... )

See note on methodologyI have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It's a graphic novel, probably the only graphic novel we'll get in this series of posts. I'm cheating slightly in that it's the third part of an autobiography sold in four albums in the original French, but the best-selling English translation binds it together with ( Read more... )

And so my travels come to a close.

( Montenegro )

Well, managed to find the new printing of Christopher Priest's The Separation in the American bookshop, so not a complete waste of time ( Read more... )

I just discovered that the Guardian coverage of the Hugo awards cited my page on this year's nominees! Bounce!

Off to Austria now for a three-day staff meeting, topped and tailed by talks with OSCE diplomats.