Two weeks ago, I took F on his first trip to Bosnia. I lived in Banja Luka, the main city of the Republika Srpska (the Serbian part of Bosnia) from January 1997 to May 1998, and was joined by Anne and B from that September (B, who was born in June 1997, was very tiny). We then moved to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, from May to December 1998, ( Read more... )

I first visited Dubrovnik with Anne in 1996, just after the war, and we came back in 1997 with baby B and in 1998 with toddler B. I have been a few times since, but usually without much time to look around. Yesterday, however, our conference finished at lunchtime, and it turned out that C, another participant, is also a Game of Thrones fan; ( Read more... )

See note on methodologySorry, Croatian friends, but there is a very clear winner and I'm not sure that you are going to like it. Although the book starts in Syria, and ends in Trieste, most of it is set in a snowdrift outside Vinkovci in which various personal dramas, some based on the then-recent Lindbergh kidnapping, are played out without much ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Berlaymont display:


( Read more... )

(Also known as Dubrovnik.)
( Read more... )

Cheerful news on the electoral front today. Croatia has voted by almost 2 to 1 - rather more strongly than opinion polls suggested - to join the European Union. (Official results are not out yet but my old friends at GONG have done their own calculations.) And the Finnish presidential election will be a runoff between the establishment Conservative ( Read more... )

After a long night of fractious negotiations which saw the UK write itself out of future European economic integration, there was a tangible shift of mood in Brussels this morning as Croatia signed its accession treaty with the European Union. It will become the 28th EU member state on 1 July 2013, just over ten years since lodging its membership ( Read more... )

I got to know the author ten years ago while he was the Bosnian ambassador to the EU and NATO, and he did one thing for me for which I will forever remain grateful: he introduced me to sushi. In 2000 he resigned his diplomatic position and returned to his career in banking, and most of the essays collected here were written after that, as opinion ( Read more... )

Various sources are reporting the death of Johnny Byrne, who wrote much of the hit series All Creatures Great and Small (based on the pseudonymous reminiscences of Yorkshire vet "James Herriot", and starring among others a youthful Peter Davison) and also wrote three Doctor Who stories, The Keeper of Traken, Arc of Infinity and Warriors of the Deep ( Read more... )