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“... most Russians, the peninsula remained an exotic place. After touring Crimea in the summer of 1820, Pushkin wrote The Fountain of Bakchisarai, an Orientalist fantasy of opulence, despots and harems, with ‘young captives’ who ‘frolic in cool pools’. Most Russian imperial administrators saw their Tatar subjects as backward, uncivilised and potentially ...”

“... Russian, Italian and French, were for members the natural media of intelligence and imagination. Pushkin’s feeling for the family of art was as strong as Auden’s, and Pushkin was a forerunner of this latterday renaissance of cosmopolitanism, however inevitably he is also Russia’s great national poet. Even while the ...”

“... city in which Russians never really felt at home. Their distress is brilliantly conveyed in Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman (an allusion to Falconet’s statue of Peter on a rearing charger). Herzen described the city as a huge barracks, and it was often associated with military imagery. Peter endeavoured to do with the Russian upper class what he ...”

“... over this murder story. In a London cinema he watches a newsreel about the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles: ‘There was even a shot of the king, through the open rear door of the car – I think it was a Panhard-Levassor – lying on the floor.’ ‘I think it was a Panhard-Levassor’: it is in such tangy asides – usually ...”

“... the Eighties remarks, ‘I see only ... a grubby competition for publication and money.’ It is Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s misfortune to have survived into the new age. Alone of the major dissidents – only Sakharov rivalled him in stature – he came back to the country from which he had been expelled twenty years before. The late Joseph Brodsky, asked in ...”

“... cities. In 1247 it acquired its own minor prince, and in 1262 it was awarded to Daniel, the son of Alexander Nevsky. After that it grew steadily in riches and power. Daniel’s descendants gradually accumulated territory, by conquest, purchase and dynastic marriage. They also claimed ever grander titles, until Ivan IV was crowned tsar (caesar, emperor) in ...”

“... The ardour of a number of armchair philhellenes cooled when they met Greeks in the flesh. Pushkin, for instance, initially viewed the Greeks as the ‘legal heirs’ of Homer and Themistocles. But, following an unhappy encounter with the Greek merchants of Chishinau in Bessarabia, he wrote that it was ‘unforgivable childishness’ that enlightened ...”

“... are haunted by Napoleon and Byron to much the same degree as are the writings of Stendhal and Pushkin, and Byron’s account of English high society in the last five cantos of Don Juan frequently comes to mind when reading Pückler’s account of its more rigid or frigid lords and ladies, and the relaxed culture of the country house. But in some ...”

“... involvement of young Jews in socialist and revolutionary movements. When a son was born in 1889 to Alexander Helphand (Parvus), ‘world revolutionary, international financier and future German government agent’, he announced ‘the birth of a healthy, cheerful enemy of the state’. It is often suggested that Jewish advancement in Russia was blocked by the ...”

“... Venetian girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the Cavalier Angelo Mengaldo, a former officer in Napoleon’s Army who claimed to have swum the Berezina under Russian gunfire. Mengaldo took to a gondola long before Venice was reached, and Scott gave up at the Rialto bridge. If Byron’s ...”

“... affairs were justified by emergency laws passed as long ago as 1881, after the assassination of Alexander II. Provincial governors often banned books or fined newspapers and even suspended their publication. Government officials were not accountable before the law for their transgressions. Police would attend professional congresses and curtail them if they ...”

“... and where, on the balcony, the Deputies were ready to greet the marchers. It was then that General Alexander Rutskoi, in a dapper suit, his bodyguards holding a flak jacket in front of him, called for an attack on the Ostankino TV tower and the Mayor’s office opposite, to which the riot police had already withdrawn. A colleague from Reuters thought Rutskoi ...”

“... of the Thaw), infused with ‘a yearning to see nature anew, to paint it differently’. The Pushkin Museum began to get its Impressionist paintings out of storage, and big exhibitions from both Soviet and French collections followed. The Impressionists’ Paris, Ehrenburg’s and Yves Montand’s, all merged in a single romantic Soviet myth of the ...”

“... these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with history – her examples are Goethe and Pushkin – is there for contrast, that her aim is to talk about, even justify, the existence of the poet without history. The poet with history is either defunct or everywhere, and therefore scarcely a poet at all; the poet without history is an enigma or a ...”

“... Both men’s eloquent but limited gestural vocabularies are unabated. A huge crowd has gathered. Alexander Bloch from PEN, an elegant figure in a pin-striped suit and brown suede shoes, nods towards the speakers and says: ‘The strong, silent Russian hasn’t been invented yet.’ Madame Bloch asks me if I do not think the translation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ...”