Bloodlands with Lucy Beckett

The Blood Lands are the lands between Germany and Russia, whose boundaries and peoples have changed and changed again under the pressure of empires and wars.

Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine saw the very worst of the horrors of World War II as Nazi and Soviet armies devastated their cities, towns and villages and killed millions, not only in battle but in concentration camps, labour camps and death camps.

Their suffering neither began nor ended with World War II.

Lucy Beckett will tell their story as the background to the reality and the threat of President Putins own wars (and as part of the background to the history of Israel).Lucy Beckett has written a dozen books of different kinds.

Her six novels include A Postcard from the Volcano, set in Germany between the World Wars, and The Leaves are Falling, set in Poland, Belarus and Russia in World War II and in postwar Yorkshire and London.

She taught English, Latin and History for twenty-five years at Ampleforth Abbey and College, and she regularly lectures and reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement and the Tablet.