Gordon McKechnie

I wrote  this article in 2014. Despite temptations to bring it up to date, I leave it here as it was then written. It is even more poignant now that many of us are soon to have our cherished European Citizenship taken away. Freedom of movement within the European Union, that David Cameron and his friends are challenging, is a fundamental right of a European citizen. Some 2 million UK citizens are currently using this right to live in other EU countries. There are, however, more people than you might imagine who, actually or potentially, are able to avail themselves of this right. This arises because of the quirks in the nationality laws of individual member states. I was in Goa for of the feast of St Francis-Xavier last year. There was much talk in town - and articles in the local newspapers - about dual nationality, something Indian citizenship law does not (in a strict sense) permit, but which many in Goa seek. Until 1961, when India invaded and annexed it, Goa wa...

East-West Review: The Journal of the Great Britain-Russia Society published "The Finland Station" in its Spring/Summer 2017 Issue (Vol.16 no. 1; Issue 44) There was a time in my life, brief but passionate, when I thought that the best time ever to have been alive would have been the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that the best social milieu in which to have moved then would have been among the Russian revolutionaries, the intelligentsia in exile. A poster of Lenin against a blood-red background looked sternly down then from my bedroom wall and books such as E.H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles , Adam Ulam's Lenin and the Bolsheviks , John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World , Isaac Deutscher's three volumes on Trotsky (well, only bits of that one) and Lenin's own What is to be Done? fuelled my enthusiasm. High in the list of these books was Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station . Even the title had a splendidly romantic ring ...