Myanmar (Formerly Burma)

Among the many horrors of World War II was the construction of the Burma–Thailand Railway, where tens of thousands of prisoners dropped dead of illness, exhaustion, and malnutrition, and once strong young men were reduced to skeletal frames of flesh. Jacqueline Passman, daughter of a British prisoner of war, talks to us about the experiences of her father, Harry Silman, a doctor with the British Army who was there and kept a diary, now published for the first time.

Wendy Law-Yone says the same blend of megalomania and mysticism inherent in Burmese despots and witnessed in 17th-century Burma, that dynastic lunacy with delusions of divinity, is still in florid evidence today

Sean Turnell, a renowned expert on the Burmese economy, says Burma is more like Zimbabwe than Vietnam or China

The author and journalist talks about a Burma where women wear fresh flowers in their hair, where houses are populated by spirits, butterflies are as big as brooches and the regime throws political prisoners into camps

The American writer has an obsession with recording Burma’s vanishing stories before the current regime's actions result in the rewriting of Burmese history. She chooses five books on the real Burma

The Swedish Journalist says Burma has always played its neighbours against each other and managed to stay neutral. That neutrality is gone now. It is not so much a client as a close ally of China