St Petersburg
The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce
Stationed in Paris from 1926 to 1940, the wealthy, debonair ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, often seen as a model for James Bond, was also a supremely effective intelligence officer
Introducing Tchaikovsky the merry scamp
Rescuing the composer from his tortured image, Simon Morrison presents him as a sort of Till Eulenspiegel character, laughing and pranking his way through life
Sarah Rainsford joins the long list of foreign correspondents banned from Russia
After decades of writing about Russian affairs, Rainsford now finds herself persona non grata – but admits she no longer feels nostalgia for the country
My summer of love with God’s gift
Studying in Russia in 1994, Viv Groskop falls in love with a Ukrainian rock guitarist named Bogdan Bogdanovich and accompanies him on a visit home
From St Petersburg to St Andrews
Aneliya, the Russian narrator of David Keenan’s enjoyably weird new novel, is worried about her dad. Tomasz’s modest music career…
Where would ballet be without Marius Petipa?
Should the man on the Clapham omnibus ever turn his mind to ballet, he is bound to envisage the work…
How Diderot’s pleas to end despotism fell on deaf ears in Russia
Denis Diderot (1713–84) is the least commemorated of the philosophes. Calls for his remains to be moved to the Panthéon…
Fleeing Mother Russia
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
St Petersburg
Looking across the wide Neva from Vasilyevsky Island, the Palace Embankment shimmers in the river, suspended between water and sky.…
Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky knows all the secrets of his museum, and he’s keeping them
The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go…
Diary
Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different…
Diary
My trips to meet Russians in Russia these days are a little less controversial than my encounter with them in…
Crimean notebook
Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little…
