I want to give you a rare behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like being an investigative journalist in Malta after the car bomb assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. And so I reached out to my friend Caroline Muscat, founder and editor-in-chief of The Shift, the Maltese investigative news portal where I was a weekly columnist for over four years. If you’ve read my new book A Sunny Place...
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Ryan Murdock My new book is now available for your reading pleasure. It’s called A Sunny Place for Shady People, and it’s about six years I spent living on the island of Malta. I went there because I wanted to write an island book inspired by Lawrence Durrell — and there was light and laughter in those early years. But then there was an election, and everything...
Berlin residents must have felt one step closer to the future in the decade before the Cold War ended. That’s when a 313-metre-long spacecraft materialized in Westend. East Berlin was building their Palace of the Republic in the 1970s, and the West’s Congress Hall in the Tiergarten — known as the pregnant oyster for its unfortunate shape — was too small. A competition was held to...
The villa of the Wannsee conference Remembrance Day isn’t observed here in the country that started and lost two World Wars. But Berlin is filled with memorials which commemorate the Twentieth Century’s darkest events. I normally stand alone in my study for the 11am moment of silence. But this year I decided to observe Remembrance Day by visiting the Wannsee villa where Nazi bureaucrats met to...
Matthew Carr The Pyrenees is one of the great European landscapes. It cuts across the mouth of the Iberian peninsula, forming the border between France and Spain. It’s been a place of beauty and of terror; a passage for refugees, dissidents and resistance fighters; and the cradle of both religious heresy and religious pilgrimage. This fascinating region is too often overshadowed by the...
Jacob Mikanowski I’ve always found the history of Eastern Europe difficult to come to grips with compared to Western Europe. The history and culture of Spain, France and Italy seem to fall within clearly defined boundaries. We know what French or Italian food is, with all its regional variations, and we have a sense of French and Italian film or literature. Eastern Europe is different. Its...
Barney White-Spunner (Photo by Millie Pilkington) Berlin has always been a uniquely nonconformist corner of a remarkably orderly country. It was the capital of Prussia, but its rulers preferred to live on its forested outskirts rather than in their palaces on the Spree. It came to symbolize Nazi Germany, but Hitler despised its rebellious, irreverent, freethinking residents. And for more than 40...
Joseph Roth Joseph Roth was one of the foremost European writers of the 20th century, and he wrote one of the period’s greatest novels. He wrote about the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of dispossessed people whose homeland was destroyed. His journalism captured fleeting moments with universal implications, and the social conflict, cultural upheaval, and acceleration of the inter...
I went back to Canada for a couple weeks in October to visit friends and family. This journey required six flights — three in each direction — every one of which was delayed. I traveled on three airlines: Lufthansa, Air Canada and SwissAir. All failed in multiple ways despite charging me far more money and delivering far less than in the past, with the exception of physical discomfort which...
Edith Durham, Albania’s ‘mountain queen’ When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains in Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their “mountain queen” for her staunch advocacy of Albanian independence and her love of its people. I’d stumbled across a copy of her 1909 book High Albania while preparing for my trip, and...
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