Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives, receives in his hotel a very unexpected visitor.

North Africa, 1954. The Algerian war of independence begins, a traumatic and extremely violent catastrophe that for eight long years will shake and finally overthrow the foundations of the colonial regime established by France in 1830.

A portrait of Palestinian political leader Yasser Arafat (1929-2004).

A detailed account of the two millennia of intolerance and persecution suffered by the Jews, from antiquity to the present day.