September 19, 2018
Klagenfurt is the capital of the modern state of Carinthia, in southern Austria. Statue of the 18th Century Austrian Empress Maria Theresa in Klagenfurt, Austria Klagenfurt was founded in 1246 by Bernhard von Spanheim, Duke of Carinthia But the story of Klagenfurt, and Carinthia, goes back much farther in the mists of time. According to […]
September 17, 2018
For those of you who’ve followed my #100yearsago tweets, this should be a familiar name: the Isonzo River, scene of repeated, grinding, futile battles between the Italians and Austrians in the First World War. The Isonzo River cuts its way through a steep mountain valley in the Julian Alps to the north, exiting around Gorizia, […]
September 16, 2018
Before it was transferred to Italy after World War I, Trieste – on the Adriatic Sea – was the main port city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a major center of shipping and commerce, and the self-conscious grandeur the Austrians tried to achieve there is obvious. My hotel in Trieste, the Excelsior, was one […]
August 13, 2018
From August 2018 A visit to the German Tank Museum in Munster, Lower Saxony – about an hour outside of Hamburg. The quote on the wall says “He who wants peace, talk of war”. Replica of a German A7V tank from World War I. The only genuine surviving article is in Australia. Inside the German […]
June 13, 2018
From June 13, 2018: Today I went exploring in the extensive catacombs underneath the city of Odessa, Ukraine – one entrance to which you can see in the picture below, in the city outskirts. Most of Odessa’s catacombs were originally underground quarries for the stone used to build the city. But they became a vital […]
June 8, 2018
From a series of Twitter threads posted in June 2018: Welcome to Chernobyl, Ukraine, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident on April 26, 1986. I’ve come here on a special day-tour from Kyiv. The site is about 62 miles north of Ukraine’s capital, about 10 miles from the border with Belarus. At the start […]
March 28, 2018
The house of T.E. Lawrence in the desert of Wadi Rum, Jordan. In this thread, follow me in the footsteps of “Lawrence of Arabia”. T.E. Lawrence was a young English archaeologist and linguist, already experienced in the Middle East, who during World War I joined up as a British Army intelligence officer, based in Cairo. […]
March 31, 2017
In March 2017, my travel pics and WWI tweets converged in the western Uruguay town of Fray Bentos – home of the OXO bouillon cube. In 1840s, German scientist Justus von Liebig became convinced the common practice of boiling beef destroyed much of its nutritional value. In 1847, Liebig invented “meat extract” as a means […]
January 17, 2017
On my last day in Chile, I decided to leave Santiago and drive as high into the nearby Andes Mountains as I could, to the border with Argentina. Passing through the town of Los Andes, Chile, on the way to … the Andes. The road kept going higher and higher into the Andes, but at […]
February 20, 2015
I have a new article out in Foreign Policy magazine: It’s Time to Kick Germany Out of the Eurozone Why the anchor dragging down the European economy isn’t Athens — it’s Berlin. Last year, Germany racked up a record trade surplus of 217 billion euros ($246 billion), second only to China in global export dominance. To some, this made Germany a […]