The content outlines China’s historical journey from the late Ming dynasty to the modern era under President Xi Jinping. It emphasizes key events such as the Qing dynasty, opium wars, rise of communism, and China’s transformation into a global superpower. The book serves as an accessible introduction to understanding China’s contemporary significance.
The past year’s headlines have been hijacked by global conflict. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli reaction to Hamas in Palestine. These two major wars have dominated. Yet a major, long-running war that has endured for 35 years came to a head in September 2023 when the conflict…
View More The Long, Forgotten War in Nagorno-Karabakh
I am a new member of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London. On a recent visit, I made use of the vast resources of a very well-stocked library at Chatham House and this book is the first of the loans that I have finished reading. It…
View More Review: Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia To Confront The West – by Keir Giles
The Cuban Revolution was an earth-shattering event with huge consequences internationally, not just in Latin America, but further afield. I felt the impact myself whilst travelling across Scandinavia in 2005. I’d run out of clean underwear and, while scanning the aisles of a Göteborg department store, I came face to…
View More Guerrilla Heroico
I was just chatting away to Ionutz a security nurse in the local mental hospital and he’s Romanian. I passed through Bucharest a few years ago en route to Istanbul on a train journey traversing Eastern Europe. Romania seemed quite rural, poor and quite different to the Europe with which…
View More Review: Red Horizons – The True Story of Nicolae & Elena Ceausescus’ Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption – by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa
Under Nikita Khrushchev, the easing of oppression allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” to emerge despite censorship. This poignant narrative reflects the grim reality of gulag life, showcasing a political prisoner’s struggle and survival amid harsh conditions, offering a lens into the human capacity for resilience and appreciation.
View More Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I read a lot of Russian literature and am becoming a bit of an aficionado. This book was first recommended to me by an ex-girlfriend from Serbia and it’s taken me a while to actually get around to completing it but I finally have done so and can produce this…
View More Review: The Master and Margarita – by Mikhail Bulgakov
Graham Greene delivers here a classic espionage novel, fiction, set in Cuba around the time of the revolution, Greene writes in his knowledgeable subject area of expertise a comedy account of a chance vacuum salesman being recruited by Mi6 as their ‘Man in Havana.’ Struggling lone parent Wormold runs a…
View More Review: Our Man in Havana – by Graham Greene
‘War and Peace’ needs no introduction. It holds its place in the minds of contemporary society as a literary classic. One cannot pick up a newspaper article on great books without a passing mention of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Like other classical works such as the Bible, I think that their…
View More Review: War and Peace – by Leo Tolstoy
‘Kim’ is recognised as the greatest work of famous author Rudyard Kipling. This is a cult novel especially in espionage circles. It is fiction but documents the widely popular Great Game between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia, a clandestine cat and mouse conflict between the two powers fought out…
View More Review: Kim – by Rudyard Kipling
This is one of the very best books I have ever read. It is up to date material and full of cutting edge military theory and ideas and I believe is critical essential reading for any politician or military personnel, especially those who conduct their employment in the NATO led…
View More Review: The Dragons and the Snakes – How The Rest Learned to Fight The West – by David Kilcullen
There is irony in this tale as Bill Browder was following in his grandfather’s footsteps in some ways but was also radically poles apart. Browder’s grandfather had stood for Presidential election in the USA on a Communist ticket. Bill Browder was drawn to business possibilities behind the Iron Curtain and…
View More Review: Red Notice – How I Became Putin’s No.1 Enemy – by Bill Browder
I’ve read Gordon Correra’s previous work in espionage literature and for this reason I was drawn to seek out this new offering. In the current climate of the Russian invasion of Ukraine under ex KGB spy, Vladimir Putin, I felt that this relatively recent work would highlight some of the…
View More Review: Russians Among Us – Sleeper Cells & The Hunt for Putin’s Agents – by Gordon Correra
Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most influential and critical figures of the twentieth century. When I was growing up in the 1980s he was part os a set of international world leaders that seemingly had much more influence over people than the political leaders of today. Gorbachev was the…
View More Review: Memoirs – by Mikhail Gorbachev
The author of this, the best study of Vladimir Putin that I have read to date, is Catherine Belton, a Financial Times journalist that was based in Moscow. It is a comprehensive study of the rise of Putin and how he has cemented a Tsar-like power as head of the…
View More Review: Putin’s People – How the KGB took back Russia and then took on The West – by Catherine Belton