I shall never forget the impression the divided Berlin made upon me when I visited it in 1985. Nicosia, visitors are reminded, is the last divided city, and there is more than an echo of the old Berlin about the atmosphere. Indeed, there is something dreadfully fascinating about the fortifications (in my picture, the UN defences at the Paphos Gate), the eerie wastelands of the buffer zone, the quiet menace of the sentries in their pill boxes (who mustn’t be approached), the sandbags and barbed wire and the ubiquitous blue-and-white (UN colours) painted oil cans, the occasional UN helicopters overhead, the Turkish soldiers in their jeeps in the north, and the very different cultural atmospheres and evidently different levels of prosperity in the two halves of the city. I raced around, seeing as much as I could (including grabbing a cup of tea in the sixth floor café of the Debenhams store on Ledra Street, which affords all-round views of the city), and crossing over to the north. This, like Berlin and Vienna in their day, is so obviously a single city and the visitor can only be saddened by the continued division.