'The Tajiks are unnervingly friendly. They take the Islamic injunction of hospitality with grave seriousness. The hungry often sacrifice their only cow for a backpacker with a camera, and the regime has liberally welcomed boots and bases on its soil.'

Despite laws, protocols and international conventions, the number of people being trafficked into servitude is growing

Russians cling to the idea of being a great power, even though the quest for empire has become illusory and self-destructive. Can a new generation change this?

A tour through Eastern Poland uncovers the wreckage of German military might

Poland used to be written off as a failed state. But it has survived Nazism and communism to become a model for Europe

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

Government intervention and increased regulation of the banking industry will only worsen the economic crisis

‘The post-1989 temptation in Prague has been two-fold. The first has been to legislate the totalitarian past out of existence, the second has been to copy the liberal West blindly at a lag of 20 years’

Standpoint's Mole in Moscow compares life for the intelligentsia under Putin with the Soviet era

The Man who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus by Justin Marozzi