St Petersburg
Short and sweet: Xstabeth, by David Keenan, reviewed
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…
Teffi: from Russia with laughs
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
St Petersburg: now's the right time to visit Russia's rebel city
Looking across the wide Neva from Vasilyevsky Island, the Palace Embankment shimmers in the river, suspended between water and sky.…
The man who knows all the Hermitage's secrets - 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…
A.N. Wilson's diary: The book that made me a writer – and the pushchair that made me an old git
Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different…
Peter Mandelson’s diary: The accomplishments of George Osborne – and Vladimir Putin
My trips to meet Russians in Russia these days are a little less controversial than my encounter with them in…
Crimean notebook: ‘They’ll have to break all my bones to make me a Russian citizen’
Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little…
