A national conscience stricken by collective guilt is not easily assuaged. For all the palliative steps that can be taken, from reparation programs and documentation centers to memorial gardens and mea maxima culpae, the blot invariably remains, like an ancient…
On a mid-November day in 1840, the Argentine intellectual Domingo Faustino Sarmiento found himself in the Zonda Valley, on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains, amidst the evergreen scrub and dusty, snow-eating wind of that desolate land. Still smarting…
In the summer of A.D. 95, the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom sailed across the Black Sea’s brine-salt waves to the city of Borysthenes, a once-stirring center of trade nestled along the right bank of the River Bug, in what is…
It was in the summer of 1845 that Thomas Eyre Poole parted from his family, picked his way through the jagged lanes of Wapping, and descended to the Thames docks at Shadwell Basin, boarding the fast-sailing brig Soundraporvy, bound for…
The City of Westminster Magistrate’s Court, located in a nondescript brick building on Horseferry Road, between Vincent Square and the River Thames in central London, has long been proud of its central role in British jurisprudence. Given its geographical proximity…
The Polish poet and playwright Jan Kochanowski penned and presented The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys to the court of King Stefan Batory in 1578, during a period of rising tensions between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Muscovy of Ivan…
The Prophecy and Other Stories By Drago Jančar, (Northwestern University Press, 143 pages, $16.95 paper) As the Paris Conference of 1919 drew to a close, the European and American mandarins having re-drawn the world’s borders to their putative satisfaction, a…
In 1942, as local gardaí collected and catalogued the intumescent corpses of the Allied sailors regularly washing up on the sand and shingle pocket beaches of western Ireland, the poet Louis MacNeice penned “Neutrality,” a searing denunciation of his homeland’s…
In his 1953 collection of political essays, The Captive Mind, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz described a visit by a Soviet journalist to Silesia in the aftermath of World War II. Mistaken for an Englishman, the journalist “was embraced on…
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — It was the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana that hosted President George W. Bush during his first tour of Europe in June 2001, as the site of the U.S.-Russia meeting. How fitting, then, that seven years later it…