Kevin Pilley takes a cane-twirling, splay-footed stroll through Charlie Chaplin’s former Switzerland home, which has become a museum to the great man.

I’M sitting at a small table in a restaurant in Castleisland with the most influential man in Kerry football over the last ten years for company.

IN HIS 1979 novel The Island of Crimea, Vasily Aksyonov imagined the region’s flourishing independence from the Soviet Union.

Cliff Robertson, PT 109, 1963.

Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior

Richard Fitzpatrick reads a fascinating account of tumultuous events in the early 1980s when the Cold War threatened to erupt into all-out confrontation.

WHEN Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the literary magazine Novy Mir back in November 1962, taboos were shattered. Secrets were unearthed. And the Soviet Union was shaken to its foundations.

NEXT week’s G-8 summit will probably be the last such meeting for Presidents George W Bush and Vladimir Putin.

Dignitaries from around the world will attend the funeral of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow today.

IT’s all of half a century now since President John F Kennedy declared: “October 23, 1956, is a day that will live forever in the annals of free men and nations.

DAVID IRVING’S three-year jail sentence for casting doubts on the Holocaust is incredible when you consider what his Stalinist counterparts got away with.

THE recent US space probe reminds me of Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of the earth for one hour and 29 minutes in April 1961.

Cuba’s President Fidel Castro has said on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev helped create the conflict by misleading US president John F Kennedy – indicating that there were no nuclear weapons on the communist island.