Top Highlights

• During my later journeys, the events and realities I confronted led me to develop a hard realist view of the world.
• ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’ Søren Kierkegaard
• Bosnia and Kosovo have small networks of extremist Islamists that have grown as jihadists have returned from the Middle East, and there are many extreme nationalists in Macedonia, Kosovo, Republika Srpska and Serbia who would seek to pour fuel onto any small fire which broke out in hope of a bigger conflagration.
• Other European countries took little notice of this, or the increasing cross-border tensions, preoccupied as they were with Brexit, the Gilets Jaunes and Catalonia, among other things, but down in the Balkans things were once again stirring.
• ‘I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.’ Thomas Jefferson