The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps. ...

The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps. The original text was first published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir, during the Khrushchev 'thaw'. However, in the rush to bring out the first translation, the novel was significantly diminished. The idiosyncratic language of the protagonist
- a man of peasant origins & no formal education
- the colloquialisms & prison-camp slang were inadequately rendered; dense, elliptical syntax was smoothed over; earthy dialogue vanished into euphemism. Moreover, the novel, published in the Soviet Union for avowedly political reasons, was received abroad almost exclusively as a political sensation. With this new translation, however, the full measure of the work's artistic achievement can finally be gauged.

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Foreshadowing his later detailed accounts of the Soviet prison-camp system, Solzhenitsyn's classic portrayal of life in the gulag is all the more powerful for being slighter & more personal than those later monumental volumes. Continuing the tradition of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky & Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn is fully worthy of them in narrative power & moral authority. His greatest work. ...

The remarkable true story of how one man saved the stray dogs of Afghanistan.

In a remote outpost of Now Zad, in

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In February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese. Denys Peek & his brother were just two of tens of thousands of British & Commonwealth soldiers & citizens taken prisoner.
Eight months later, he & his comrades were packed into steel goods wagons & transported by rail to Siam. They were to become part of the slave labour force destined for the massive construction project that would later become infamous as the Burma Thailand Railway. He would spend the next three years in over fifteen different work & 'hospital' camps on the railway, stubbornly refusing to give in & die in a place where over 20, 000 prisoners of war & uncounted slave labourers met their deaths.
Narrated in the present tense & written with clarity, passion & a remarkable eye for detail, Denys Peek has vividly recreated not just the hardships & horrors of the railway & the daily struggle for survival but also the comradeship, spirit & humour of the men who worked on it. It stands as a haunting, evocative & deeply moving testimony to the suffering of those who lived & died there
- a salutary reminder of man's potential for inhumanity to his fellow man.


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It is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident
- an incident which changes the
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It is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident
- an incident which changes the
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