Vesna Goldsworthy

Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania came out in 1998.

From The Blog
23 November 2012

Now that Vivienne and Valerie are both dead,Now that he has been dead for over forty yearsAnd I can hurt no one with this admission,I will say that I too was fourteenWhen I fell in love with Tom:That Anglo-Catholic parting,The face chiselled by decades of quiet agony,The 'four-piece suit' ... but what did Virginia know of restraint,That silly, arrogant woman, with her insidious, toxic heritage?

Diary: In Montenegro

Vesna Goldsworthy, 17 February 2000

The broad new motorway which used to connect Central Europe with Greece and Turkey was eerily empty when I took it last autumn. On the fertile Vojvodinian lowlands between Belgrade and the Hungarian frontier, the freshly ploughed fields were dotted with pieces of twisted iron, sculpted by Nato pilots during the bombing campaign. At one point, an oil refinery has been turned into a group of half-melted steel toadstools; at another, the broken arch of a bridge across the Danube points curlicues towards the sky. The charred skeleton of a building flashes by every now and then. The approach to Belgrade is signalled by occasional sightings of crowded and dilapidated buses on suburban lines, but it no longer announces itself by that yellowish glow against the night sky which normally heralds places of this size.

‘Kosovo,’ the Prime Minister tells us, ‘is on the doorstep of Europe.’ The province, we learn, is situated near countries like Greece and Italy with which British people...

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