Robert Fisk
For some reason, our last century’s two world wars started rather far from home. I bet that most people in January 1914 couldn’t find Sarajevo on a map. But then again, how many of us – really, I mean – could have found Simferopol on a map a year ago? Or three weeks ago, for that matter? The Second World War started because Britons simply wouldn’t take another crooked deal like Czechoslovakia – “a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”, in which our Neville at least put distance in front of ignorance. So Poland it was, which, by awful mischance, shares a border with modern-day Ukraine.
