Ian Thoms

Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic and faith healer, was born to a muzhik (peasant) family in western Siberia in 1869. Siberia’s desolate immensity of tundra and reindeer pasture was described by Dostoevsky, in his prison memoir The House of the Dead (1... See more

On 9 March 1944, the Soviet Air Forces started to bomb the Estonian capital, Tallinn, that, at the time, was occupied by Nazi Germany; some 600-700 civilians died, over 600 were wounded and some 20,000 people were left homeless; Estonian World publishes a... See more

The word ‘obscene’, according to the dictionary, refers to anything ‘offensively or grossly indecent, lewd’. By the standards of the day, the Little Review was a borderline obscene, certainly at times salacious, literary journal. For the crime of serialis... See more

In 1953, William Golding was a middle-aged schoolteacher living in a council flat in Salisbury when he submitted a typescript of what would become Lord of the Flies to the London publishers Faber & Faber. Drearily titled “Strangers from Within”, the n... See more

28 February 2026 The word ‘ghetto’ is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for ‘foundry’: ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the centre of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry distric... See more