-
Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.
-
Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.
-
Though Barbados has been independent since 1966, its capital, Bridgetown, still has elements of a thriving British colonial port.
-
The eight-year-long Algerian war was to bring down six French prime ministers, open the door to de Gaulle - and come close to destroying him, too. The war was the last of the grand-style colonial struggles, but, perhaps more to the point, it was also the first campaign in which poorly equipped Muslim mujahedin licked one of the top Western armies.
-
In the 17th century, Barbados was regarded in London as 'the brightest jewel in the English crown'.
-
In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.