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

My husband’s Auntie Dulcie was a dedicated family historian. No one joined dots like she did. Whenever we visited her, she would proudly...

Istria may have been prized by Venice, France, Italy, Austria and Yugoslavia, but it was not a wealthy region. Marcus Tanner, in his...

My birth mother Silvana from Istria died in 2020 aged ninety-nine years, nine months and three-quarters. She outlived all her...

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....

The BALKAN ESSAYS of Hubert Butler The Irish Pages Press, 2016 I bought Hubert Butler’s Balkan Essays specifically to read The Artuković...

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 -...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two opposing political movements emerged from the fall of the old empires: the extreme right...

By what convoluted route did an Australian come to write an historical novel about Slovenian Trieste? It’s a long story. Asking my birth...