Dublin: The best small city to be stabbed in

Many history enthusiasts will be familiar with the concept of the “potemkin village” – a fake prop settlement designed to impress outsiders and make a regime look better than it really is.

The phrase comes from the Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin, who lived in the 1700s. Potemkin supposedly sought to impress the Russian Empress Catherine the Great by building fake pop-up villages out of pasteboard in Crimea, and importing peasants from central Russia to make these flimsy structures look inhabited.