Be There or Be Square
31 October 2016 | Culture
I wish I’d been in Berlin on 9 November 1989 to see the wall come down. I finally got there on 21 October 1991, nearly two years later, and totally because a collection of my German Berlin friends had all insisted I had to see Berlin before it was changed forever. At ...
View Post
A Day Trip to Chernobyl
4 July 2016 | Places
Or Chornobyl? That’s the Ukrainian spelling and that’s where the deadly nuclear reactor is located. Chernobly is the Russian spelling. Ditto for Kyiv (Ukrainian) and Kiev (Russian)
◄ I’m standing outside Reactor 4 and holding up a Geiger counter to show that I’m qu...
View Post
Voices from Chernobyl – The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
14 March 2016 | Media
Last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl – The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster is exactly what its title indicates, a series of monologues about the Chernobyl meltdown.
Human error (a foolish shutdown ...
View Post
The Dark Tourist
28 March 2013 | Media
Since I’m finishing writing a book to be titled Dark Lands – Colombia is the last chapter and my Colombia travels concluded last week – I thought I’d better read Dom Joly’s The Dark Tourist. Mr Joly is a British comedian and he’s very popular with the British, or ...
View Post