Tea with titans

On the morning of 9 January 1905 (22 January on the New Style calendar Soviet Russia later adopted), a crowd of striking workers marched peacefully through Saint Petersburg towards the Winter Palace,

In Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk, a privileged and wealthy cohort – lawyer, doctor, engineer and their families gather in an idyllic country retreat in the summer of 1905 to relax, party and gossip. But al

Konstantin Vaginov Goat Song and The Works and Days of Whistlin Translated by Ainsley Morse with Geoff Cebula 376pp. New York Review Books. Paperback, £17.99. Had a new translation of Konstantin Vagin

In January 1918, a few months after Lenin’s Bolsheviks had captured the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Rhoda Power left the house in Rostov-on-Don where she was employed as a governess and wandered throu

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li

Michael Fjeldsøe, Katarina Smitt Engberg, Bjarke Moe Aarhus University Press 978-87-7597-332-3 794pp (hb) £39 Academic studies of composers notoriously combine convoluted, abstract thinking with an in