Article list

27.04.2023.

White Horse: the 1923 Cup Final, my Grandfather and Me

How one man's road to Wembley went through Egypt, East Africa and beyond

17.12.2022.

Balkan Trails

How independent travellers discovered the former Yugoslavia

17.12.2022.

Bookpackers

Do travel books really deserve a place in your luggage?

17.12.2022.

Stardust Soundtracks: Bowie, Britain and the Seventies

David Bowie's performance of Starman on BBC's Top of the Pops in July 1972 is one of the most mythologized four minutes in the history of British television.

10.07.2022.

Vinyl Idols

Released forty years ago, Odbrana i poslednji dani by Belgrade band Idoli has long been touted as the best Yugoslav album of all time.

10.07.2022.

Last Train to Kupari

Czechoslovakia's Shangri-la on the shores of the Adriatic.

10.07.2022.

On the Road Again

A journey through the career of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, winner of this year's EBRD Literature Prize.

10.07.2022.

Three Kings

The strange, subversive tale of the Vilnius Jazz Trio

06.07.2021.

Opatija Noir

It wouldn’t be a seaside town if it didn’t have a dark side

26.05.2021.

Empire in Crumbs

Dominique Kirchner Reill’s new book The Fiume Crisis takes an iconoclastic new look at the history of Rijeka after World War I

26.05.2021.

Iron in the Soul

It is forty years since Andrzej Wajda’s epoch-defining Man of Iron walked away with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

17.12.2020.

4 x fiction, 4 x fact

Eight books that made a difference in 2020.

17.12.2020.

Jazz Messenger

Komeda: A Private Life in Jazz by Magdalena Grzebałkowska tells the story of Poland’s most talented musician of the jazz generation, and reveals what exactly jazz meant to a Polish society in the throes of rapid change.

17.06.2020.

Living the Dream

Central Europe, Milan Kundera and Yugoslavia

12.05.2020.

Dropping the baton: Tito, youth culture and the Slovene syndrome

Tito’s cult of personality prevailed for a few years following his death in May 1980. By the end of the decade, however, this legacy was in a serious state of dissipation.

13.12.2019.

Torpedo Town

The world’s first fully-operational torpedo was developed in Rijeka by Bolton-born engineer Robert Whitehead

04.11.2019.

The Battle for Rīga

It is 100 years since a combined force of Germans and Russians were beaten back by a nascent Latvian army, backed up by British and French warships

06.09.2019.

Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Culture of Violence

Was the Italian soldier-poet a liberator? Or a warning of the dark times to come?

24.06.2019.

Yugoslavia in the Year 2000

Throughout 1960, Globus magazine ran a series of articles about what they thought the country would look like in the year 2000. Casting their eyes over existing plans for concrete suburbs and high-rise cities, Globus’s writers were essentially saying that, thanks to socialism, the future was already here.

12.09.2018.

Journey to Russia

Miroslav Krleža’s masterpiece of mid-Twenties reportage is a compelling hybrid of travelogue, personal memoir and political essay

11.09.2018.

Caution, Futurist Approaching

Marinetti, World War I, and why he ended up in Rijeka in 1919

10.09.2018.

The Elusive Emperor

Few people are so central to the history of Split as Roman Emperor Diocletian. And yet it’s surprising how little we know about the man.

06.06.2017.

What is a song without a sleeve? Jugoton’s place in art and pop

Zagreb record label Jugoton didn’t just nurture a unique music scene. It also set new standards in Croatian design

05.01.2017.

Man in a Suitcase

Why we should be rereading Joseph Roth in 2017

14.12.2016.

Sachertorte, Sacher-Masoch

So what is it that makes Vienna the capital of sex?

25.11.2016.

Hoochie Coochie Hoću Kući

Is Milan Manojlović Mance’s Man from Katanga the greatest Croatian album ever made?

22.9.2016.

Subversive Soundtracks

Forty years ago members of Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe were put on trial for playing music that the country’s communist rulers didn’t like the sound of.

22.9.2016.

(Come on Baby) Light my Choir

Traditional choral festivals provided a natural focus for the so-called Singing Revolution, which swept across the Baltic States in 1987-1990.

09.5.2016.

Rijeka Rock City

It was the port city of Rijeka that led the way when it came to Croatia’s relationship with the electric guitar, and it is Rijeka that preserves most in terms of rock and roll heritage today.

12.4.2016.

Awesome Orson

So why is there a statue of Orson Welles in the Croatian City of Split?

10.4.2016.

We Play World War: Karl Kraus and the end of Austria

Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was one of the few people who wrote against World War I from start to finish: not because he thought there was anything wrong in defending one’s flag, but because he saw how patriotism was hijacked by the mass media.

16.3.2016.

Crucif*cked: the extraordinary career of Egon Bondy

Outside Czech-speaking circles, underground writer and philosopher Egon Bondy remains almost unknown; however it’s hard to see where the Czech literary scene would be without him

15.3.2016.

Power Ballads: Marta Kubišová and the Velvet Revolution

The story of Marta Kubišová’s song A Prayer for Marta reveals much about the power of popular culture - and the desire of those in government to place it under control.

15.6.2015.

Death, metal: Ernst Jünger and Germany’s 20th century

The German author of Storm of Steel was the greatest writer to come out of the trenches of World War I. It’s almost exactly a century since he first saw front-line action.