Alexander Clapp

In August​ 2011, a Montenegrin sailor called Goran Radoman fled the scene of a late-night car crash in Havana. He was arrested three months later at José Martí International Airport and sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter. According to the Serbian TV channel Insajder, the highest levels of the Serbian state lobbied the Cuban government for Radoman’s...

The Greeks threatened the painstakingly constructed post-Napoleonic order. There were three million of them, Christians who lived across an area stretching from the Greek mainland to Cyprus to the coasts of Asia Minor to Constantinople itself, all within an Ottoman Empire whose decline was the subject of open diplomatic speculation. ‘What is Greece?’ Metternich had asked when the prospect of an independent Greek state was raised at the Congress of Vienna. No one could give a precise reply. 

The hotel​ where I worked was called the Mykonos Grace. It was a whitewashed stucco building of 32 rooms. Most went for hundreds of euros a night – around what each of the staff made in a month. The cheapest rooms were at street level. An angry French couple once uploaded a video to TripAdvisor of every truck that rumbled past their room over the course of an afternoon. Rooms on the...

Syriza is the most successful product so far of the left that stayed at home. The first major step towards its eventual election victory was taken in 1992, when a coalition called Synaspismos brought together the leftists who’d stayed in Greece after the Civil War – who were by then Eurocommunists – and many who returned from places like Beloiannisz and were still ‘orthodox’ communists. Three years later, almost half of these orthodox communists left the coalition because of what they saw as too many capitulations to capitalist interests.