‘THE CORAL IS dying,’ said Daniel to a small and disinterested family of floppy-hatted, baked-skinned tourists. The matriarch wore a translucent beach robe that shimmied around her wide hips. She took snaps of a coral tank on her iPhone then looked away, instantly gratified. The chill thrust of the air…

‘Is it far?’                    ‘Who knows? I wasn’t even sure this road existed. No signs. Sometimes there are roads on maps that were planned but never built. Other times there are roads like this that aren’t on any maps. At least the road’s here. But Sorsk Gorod? That’s not on…

 Lance slept. Sheets damp and crumpled. Outside a siren wailed. The pale light that pierced the curtains could have meant it was almost evening. A day that had had much prospect had perished stillborn like the last four.             He dreamed about Mart because he still owed him, languishing there…

Squirreled away in the secret vaults or ‘Спецхран’ of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow are treasures and artefacts that have been lost to the public since 1945. They are works of art firstly looted by the Nazis and then by the Red Army—two…

In 1995 I was drawn to an article on the website of the Jamestown Foundation about the Feliks Group. Named after the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, it was established just prior to the end of the Soviet Union and the disbanding of the KGB. There’s no…