Your Family History October 2017

What image does the word ‘orphanage’ conjure up in your mind? A sunny scene of carefree children at play in the grounds of a large ivy-clad house? Or a forbidding grey edifice whose cowering inmates were ruled over with a rod of iron by a stern, starched matron? In Children's Homes, Peter Higginbotham explores the history of the institutions in Britain that were used as a substitute for children’s ‘natural’ homes.

The moving story of a writer, the Russian Vasily Grossman, and his novel "Life and Fate", one of the most violent charges ever leveled against the Stalinist regime. This is the story of a manuscript that shook the Kremlin. A book "arrested" in October 1961, in the early morning, and locked up in the basement of Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. "Why would we add your book to the bombs that our enemies are preparing against us?", wrote Mikhail Suslov, Stalin's grey eminence, to Vassili Grossman who pleaded the cause of his book. Saved from extinction thanks to the courage of a network of dissidents, including physicist Andrei Sakharov and writer Vladimir Voinovich, Life and Fate was published 1983 in France.

A springbreak favourite, Cancun and Cozumel are a lot more than just fun on the beach. This is Maya land, with the nearby ruins of Tulum and Chichén Itza, and there's also colonial architecture in Mérida and the extraordinary network of cenotes waiting to be explored.