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“... the loch’s transfixing deeps. A good thing he didn’t know anything about the resident monster. Mikhail Lermontov’s novel, A Hero of Our Time, which first appeared in 1839, opens in a situation and a landscape not very different from Samuel Johnson’s. A narrator is travelling through the Caucasus; he explains that he is not a novelist, but a travel ...”

“... unpredictably, without fear. The voice – strong, lively – belonged to the man in the chair, Mikhail Gorbachev. I remember leaning back against the window, my heart suddenly too big for my chest. So it was real. So this democracy was actually taking place, at the core of the empire, and a whole planet – rusted to its axis for generations – was ...”

“... had taken power in Moscow. Ascherson immediately understood that he had witnessed the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was spending his summer vacation in his Crimean dacha. Back in Moscow, he followed the heroic defence of the White House by Yeltsin’s supporters and the consequent defeat of the coup. This is not a history of the Black Sea, as Ascherson ...”

“... are better, in many cases, than what we call work and achievement. In which cases? The novelist Mikhail Shishkin says in an afterword that this is ‘the Russian paradox: if you want to live a worthy life, you’d best not get off the sofa at all.’ Oblomov, Shishkin says, is a ‘vital, dear and unlucky man’ and morally much to be preferred, the ...”

“... translator of classical Japanese, Grigory Chkartashvili, inspired – he avows – by Griboedov, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; his hero combines traits of Chatsky, Pechorin, Andrei Bolkonski and Prince Myshkin, with a touch of James Bond for good measure. Coquetting in the manner of a latter-day Propp, he has set out to illustrate the 16 possible ...”