I split my time between London and Brno in the Czech Republic, as a Visiting Professor of International Relations and European Studies.
In my professional capacity I have conducted extensive research into the 1989 revolutions in East and Central Europe, particularly in Romania and the former Czechoslovakia. My research interests have also taken me to a number of cities and regions of the former Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia. These include a visit to the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow. My other research area interest is nineteenth century Russian literature and the Russian political tradition.
My time living and working in the Czech Republic over the past almost thirty years inspired my novel 'The Hope', which is based on relationships between two women and a man during and after the historical events in the Czechoslovak 'Velvet Revolution' in 1989.
I have been a regular visitor to Lindos on the island of Rhodes over the past twenty years. The four whole summers I spent living there in the beautiful little tourist village, together with subsequent visits, inspired my trilogy of murder mystery novels Lindos Retribution (2016), Lindos Aletheia (2017) and Lindian Summers (2018). Those visits also inspired my subsequent novels based on the village - Lindos Affairs (2019) (tourist relationships based on attraction, lies, and revenge), Lindian Odyssey (2020) (a woman who having led a double life for 20 years searches for her family roots going back to the 1970s and the 1943 Nazi occupation) , Lindos Eros and Hades (2021) (the relationship and secrets between two Brits living in Lindos during part of the Covid pandemic and Karagoulis: Lindos life and times (2022) (the trials and tribulations of a Greek detective).
