He writes with insight and authority about the giants of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz from the 19th century and Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel-prize winning poet who died in 2004.

ECONOMIST: Poland's modern history

The story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a dashing and resourceful German Catholic businessman who saved more than a thousand Polish Jews from almost certain annihilation by the Nazis, is extraordinary even by the standards of Holocaust literature.

NEWYORKER: Schindler��s List

Now many more leading Polish painters, musicians and writers, including Wislawa Szymborska, the poet who won the 1996 Nobel prize for literature, live as well as work in Poland.

ECONOMIST: Mass distraction in Poland