Rasputin
An innocent abroad: a Dutch tour operator in 1980s Russia
‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins TheLong Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if…
Camp carnival: Roy Strong’s 80th birthday pageant
For his 75th birthday, Sir Roy Strong gave himself a personal trainer. For his 80th, he has commissioned a book…
All might have been well had Nicholas II only listened to a tiny cosmopolitan elite
The veteran Russian historian Dominic Lieven’s new study of Russia’s descent towards the first world war is deeply researched, highly…
The Russian literary celebrity who begged Tolstoy to spare Prince Andrei
Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous,…
