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“... The Maxim Gorky, a giant airliner built with money raised by the Union of Soviet Writers and Editors in 1934, was like nothing that had gone before it. The wings of the Tupolev-designed plane had a span of more than sixty metres, the same as a Boeing 747’s. It was driven by eight massive engines, generating between them 7000 horsepower ...”

“... one of his peasant soldiers from Tula who became a Bolshevik cadre; the revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky; and the peasant Sergei Semenov, a Tolstoyan activist in a village not too far from Moscow. The photographs of these five, together with Lenin, Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai, make up the section of Figes’s extremely well-chosen illustrations ...”

“... is ‘therefore true’. Now, in 1929, there began his conversion to Leninism, encouraged by Maxim Gorky, the historian M.N. Pokrovsky and the English Communist intellectual Maurice Dobb. He took to the new creed with fanatical excitement and all the convert’s zeal to proselytise. ‘What Lenin gave me was above all clarity and reality. The ...”

“... into the family of a railway employee, Afinogenov was, in his most successful years, close to Maxim Gorky and the inner circle of power – he met Stalin several times. But in 1937 he was expelled from the Party; some of his colleagues (Vladimir Kirshon, for instance) were killed. Despite this, he confesses that the year of the Great Terror was the ...”

“... green cover, it was maybe seventy pages long, and I read it in one amazed hour. The book was Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, from 1920, which the Woolfs would later republish in a fuller volume, with two more of Gorky’s reminiscences: of Chekhov and the less world-famous Leonid ...”

“... especially rankled the Bolsheviks: it was too bourgeois, too American, too sexualised. In 1928, Maxim Gorky dismissed it as the ‘music of the gross’ – music for capitalists. ‘An inhuman bass voice roars English words, one is deafened by a prodigious horn reminiscent of the shriek of a maltreated camel, a drum thunders, a pestilential pipe ...”

“... was fascinated by Moura Budberg, an interpreter he met in Russia, who he feared was a lover of Maxim Gorky (she denied it, archly). When another woman, Odette Keun, invited him to her hotel room and he found her wearing only ‘a flimsy wrap and an aroma of jasmine’ he took up with her too, although she came to infuriate him. Then there was a year ...”

“... Lives of Remarkable Men’ was a series established by Maxim Gorky in the 1930s so that the Soviet Union might know its heroes. It’s ironic that Liudmila Saraskina’s deeply admiring biography of the David who challenged the Soviet Goliath should now appear under its imprint. As Saraskina tells the story, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and Orthodox Christian, was a man with a mission from the first ...”

“... beauty and no mean intellectual who was at various times the lover of Robert Bruce Lockhart, Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells. While Moura was in revolutionary Petrograd or Sorrento or London, Tania was brought up by ‘Margaret Wilson’, whose secret daughter was Maud Gonne’ half-sister. She could not have been less typical of her class. Unlike most ...”

“... times, she hated him for treating her as a mere sexual object while despising her for being one. Maxim Gorky was probably right when he said: ‘woman, in my opinion, [Tolstoy] regards with implacable hostility and loves to punish.’ His attitude was that of a medieval ascetic to whom woman is the devil, there to tempt him. At the age of 52, just after ...”

“... spectrum; years later, old Cheka men still remembered him fondly.In 1918, along with the writer Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Novorusskii, a veteran of People’s Will, he set up the Museum of the Revolution in Petrograd, which gave him access to the archives of the Okhrana. ‘For the first time,’ he wrote, ‘the entire mechanism of an authoritarian ...”

“... Cherry Orchard. But Chekhov himself was a dachnik, as was another critic of the bourgeois dacha, Maxim Gorky. In time, dachniki, like the nobility before them, developed their own mythology about the land and the virtues of physical work, fresh air and exposure to the beauties of nature. In addition, dacha life became associated with qualities thought ...”

“... of ‘people who mattered’. Especially after Lockhart, she had some interesting lovers – Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells among them. Many people told her secrets, some of which she passed on. But she had nothing in common with the code-stealing tarts of spy fiction.Born​ into a landowning family in Ukraine, Budberg was married to a Russian diplomat ...”

“... a two-storey house on the Garden Ring Road: celebrity accommodation, comparable with the house Maxim Gorky had been given when he returned from Capri a few years earlier. But Prokofiev unexpectedly turned it down, giving the unsocialist explanation that ‘I can’t afford it.’ (Unfortunately, Morrison, usually a reliable provider of financial ...”

“... the culture of the Yurok and Sioux communities; novel analyses of the backgrounds of Hitler and of Maxim Gorky, drawing on their autobiographies; a chapter on the eight stages of life, a schema that Erikson was very fond of and was to rework rather tiresomely often. What must, I think, have struck home, and what kept students (to his amusement) rushing to ...”