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“... unlikely to disturb the consensus among historians that the world was on the brink of nuclear war. Serhii Plokhy certainly subscribes to the view that Armageddon was avoided by the narrowest of flukes. In Nuclear Folly, he describes the dangerous delegation of launch authority for tactical nuclear weapons to Soviet commanders in the field. In hair-raising ...”

“... Roadside Picnic (1972), filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker (1979). It’s an uncanny match with Serhii Plokhy’s first impression of Chernobyl as a tourist, thirty years after the explosion there in 1986. His young guide knows the site well enough, though the Soviet world of thirty years ago has faded from memory: she maintains that nobody can recall ...”

“... today Ukraine. Following The Last Empire, his much-praised history of the end of the Soviet Union, Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe tells the story of Ukraine from Ovid (for whom the Greek colonies north of the Black Sea were ‘a handful of names in a region scarcely known’) to the present, a history which echoes through and defines today’s ...”