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When George MacDonald Fraser sat down to pen Flashman, the first volume of what would eventually become a thirteen-book series known as ‘The Flashman Papers’, one doubts he knew how enduring his titular character would become. A minor figure in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s
I didn’t know much about the Icelandic sagas—or indeed much about Iceland itself, as it turned out—before opening Richard Fidler and Kari Gislason’s Saga Land. I’d be surprised if I’m alone in learning something new in its pages. I’d made
Did anyone see it coming? Did Anthony Bourdain himself? How did a man who made his name with a book that largely glamourised the swinging-dick bro culture of professional kitchens—a book whose cover showed him and a couple of other
Even at magic hour, when it is perfectly lit and the city at its most attractive, it is difficult to know what to make of Banja Luka’s “Old Dude”. Painted by the Bulgarian artist Bozhidar Simeonov, or Bozko, on a
It has been a big year for Amedeo Modigliani. At least three exhibitions of the Italian painter and sculptor’s work are currently underway or about to open around the world. In New York City, ‘Modigliani Unmasked’ opened at the Jewish
The Vietnam War begins like so many Ken Burns films before it: by listing, in the inimitable voice of Burns’ go-to narrator Peter Coyote, a series of dichotomies that the ten-part, eighteen-hour behemoth will inevitably toggle between, and struggle with, for the
A Srebrenica widow is asked to identify her husband’s body. It is not the most promising start to a joke, but Navid Bulbulija, sipping Coca-Cola outside a café in Sarajevo, less than two minutes’ walk from the city’s Srebrenica Massacre
Sead Vrana remembers the first land mine he cleared as though it were yesterday. It was 1993, less than a month before his 18th birthday, and Mr Vrana was a soldier in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and