Neal Ascherson

In police files, as I found from my own Polish dossier, it’s not only a younger half-forgotten self that you meet. It is also an unrecognisable stranger – yourself, as others have seen you. For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation compiled by the spooks of communist Europe. Nobody, I think, remains quite the same after reading their file.

In a corner​ of the eastern Mediterranean, where the coast of Anatolia turns south towards Syria, a mountain massif rises by the sea. Its name in Ottoman times was Musa Dagh, the Moses Mountain, and its summit forms a high plateau called the Damlayik. Just over a century ago, as the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was reaching its climax, four thousand Armenian villagers...

Not many people change the world. Fewer still are thanked for it. Adolf Hitler changed the world on 22 June 1941: by invading the Soviet Union, he delivered ‘Hitler’s Europe’, the divided continent we lived in until 1989. We were not grateful for that. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev changed the world, as so many adoring millions saw it at the time, by ending the threat of their extermination by nuclear war and by allowing Europe’s ‘captive nations’ to liberate themselves. But then, a Samson already blinded by his enemies, he brought down the gigantic temple of the Soviet Union on his own head, and his own power perished with it.

In Gdansk​ , the walk to the museum takes me past the Patriotic Clothing Store. Two blonde, blue-eyed dolls stand in the window, wearing little T-shirts saying: ‘My parents are 100% Polish.’ They have their wee fists raised in what a visiting journalist from Warsaw suggested, a bit unfairly, was a fascist ‘Heil’. Inside, the shop is small and dour. Racks of grown-up...

Konrad Adenauer said that ‘peaceful Heligoland, set in the seas between Germany and Britain, will be in future a symbol of the will to peace and friendship of both nations.’ Few Britons now know where the place is. Still fewer know that it was once a British colony, a tiny offshore reminder that Britain is as much a European nation as it was ever a global power.