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“... 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 ...”

“... All this happened just a hundred miles from Dracula’s castle. Only in the Balkans. Although Vesna Goldsworthy does not investigate the Dynasty affair in Inventing Ruritania, it is a rich example of what she calls the ‘imperialism of the imagination’. The television producer who had wanted to massacre the cream of Colorado society was Camille ...”

“... when contrasted to some assumed English norm, does put it in a category.’ The guide here is Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). As she shows, writing imaginative or purely fictional work about the Balkans has been an overwhelmingly British habit. Byron can be said to have set it off. But the genre ...”

“... and were grateful to be sealed behind glass and steel in ‘a sort of tinned Occident’, as Vesna Goldsworthy put it. There were Easterners, too, who shared this uneasy view; Easterners who never thought of themselves as Easterners, such as my grandmother, Elena, whose horizon was filled with the West, with Vienna, Paris, London, all of which were ...”