Willy the florist has had enough of his kingdom. He is an unwilling subject of an unloved country. A middle-class father of 12-year-old twins running a thriving flower business in this small Dutch-speaking town on the eastern fringe of Brussels, Willy is reduced to obscene gesturing by the very mention of his country.

When empires come to the Czechs, their armies invariably come to Brdy. The sprawling, closed military area of 266ha in the rolling hills of western Bohemia is used to unwelcome visitors. Hitler pronounced this stretch of central Europe a Nazi ”protectorate”, and the Wehrmacht used the Brdy training ranges as a playground, expelling many local people.

For decades Samy Swasebard has been wandering around Europe, peddling pots and pans. He always returns to Strasbourg, where he has lived for 40 years. ”This is my favourite place, the place I call home,” says the 72-year-old, a retired Teflon salesperson. ”And if it wasn’t for Europe, between them the Germans and the French would have destroyed this place.”

In France the group’s prospective leader has been barred from teaching at his university and is awaiting a court verdict for questioning the Nazis’ mass murder of Europe’s Jews. His Bulgarian colleague brags that his country has the ”prettiest Gypsies” and says he knows where to buy 12-year-old Gypsy brides for ”up to â,¬5 000 euros”.

Sevder is seething. Growing up in poverty, he has seen schoolmates shot dead by Turkish security forces and had to put up with the vulgar taunts of Turkish policemen towards his mother and sisters. His grudges have been nourished by endless tales of family and friends burnt out of their villages and decanted into the slums of Diyarbakir.

The head of the world’s nuclear watchdog declared recently that he could not give Iran’s nuclear programme a clean bill of health, blaming Tehran for frustrating almost three years of inspections and detective work by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It’s election season in Poland. Confused by the bewildering political menu on offer, Poles might also be forgiven for thinking that they are seeing double. The ubiquitous posters of the plump, grey-haired chap demanding to be made prime minister later this month are (almost) indistinguishable from those of the plump, grey-haired bloke urging that he be made president.