Issue 80

Once upon a time… James always began his stories like that, smiling. He thought fairy tales were the best ways of telling a story and he was right. I looked at him like a little child every time he told a story. So, once upon a time, Ruben Sullivan was a legend for Interpol. Young, talented and so very clever, he had been the mastermind of pretty much every beautifully conducted art crime over the past ten years. In order to be the best, he was of course the student of the best before him. There was an old saying that when the student is ready, the master will appear. And he did.

Stanislava Kara's novel Fake is a State of Mind was shortlisted in the 2012 Bulgarian Novel Contest of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester

When in the UK, Elizabeth Allen works as a senior policy adviser to the British Government. She's worked on immigration, counterterrorism and integration policy in the Interior Ministry and led the Turkey section in the Foreign Office. She was also a professional career coach in her spare time. In Sofia she has been working with NGOs, the Office of the President, ministries and local government in support of “deinstitutionalisation” – closing down children’s home and developing local family support services.

Former prime minister

Woken by the phone’s insistent ring, he rolled to the right to swing his feet to the floor, but his knee hit the hard wall making his pictures rattle. Someone had somehow contrived to move his bed 180 degrees in the night. The phone continued its urgent shriek every four seconds. Georgi A. cursed its mother and especially the mother of whoever was hanging on relentlessly at the other end. Hadn’t he installed a gentle bluesy ring tone, a soothing coaxing musical phrase? This hectoring shriek was becoming shriller.

To everyone with an interest in Bulgarian politics and society for the past 30 years, Evgeniy Daynov has been a familiar name. Educated at the Corpus Christi College in Oxford and having taught political science at both the University of Sofia and the New Bulgarian University, Evgeniy Daynov has been at the forefront of a variety of pro-democracy movements and political parties, starting from the Ekoglasnost grassroots environmentalist movement in the late 1980s and going through the SDS, or Union of Democratic Forces, through the 1990s. Evgeniy Daynov is not your "typical" Oxon.