Category: Vladimir Putin

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Return to Highgate

When I was in London for a few days at the beginning of the year, I finally managed to make a return visit to Highgate Cemetery – one of the world’s most celebrated dark-tourism attractions in that category (cemeteries). I had first seen it in the first half of the 1980s not long after the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust had made the overgrown Western section accessible to the public on guided tours (while the Eastern section remained freely accessible then). The tour I went on left a lasting visual impression on me. So I had long wanted to go back,

Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Yesterday it was announced that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to “Nihon Hidankyo”. That’s a Japanese confederation of A-Bomb survivors (‘Hibakusha’ in Japanese) that has long been campaigning for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. This choice by the Nobel Committee was surely inspired at least in part by the repeated nuclear threats made by Vladimir Putin since his war of aggression against Ukraine started.

I’m now taking this Nobel Peace Prize choice as inspiration for a Blog Post about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities nuked by the

Dark Tourism & Villas

As decided in our recent poll, this blog post’s theme will be villas. You’ve probably been wondering how something as nice as a villa can be dark – but just read on …

Let’s start on a grand scale. The photo below shows Villa Grande.
This grand pile, more a stately mansion than a mere villa, really, was the oversized home of Vidkun Quisling, the right-winger who assumed power in Norway during World War Two as Germany’s Nazis invaded, with whom he happily collaborated. That’s what’s given the English language the expression “a quisling regime”!

Today the building houses