Catherine Merridale

Olga Chekhova was the beautiful and talented niece of Anton Chekhov’s wife, Olga Knipper. Her life spanned Lenin’s Revolution, Stalin’s Terror, and the rise and fall of Hitler’s Reich; her relatives and friends were actors, politicians, millionaires and spies. She liked to dramatise herself, embroidering her anecdotes of childhood and youth with wild jackals, rugged...

Aleksandr Nikitenko’s memoir is unusual: the fact that it exists is odd enough. Nikitenko was a serf, born in 1804 or 1805 in the village of Alekseevka, in the Ukrainian province of Voronezh. Few people from his background would have been able to write their own names, let alone a full-scale history of their lives. The thirty million serfs of the Russian Empire were little more than...

Elena’s invitation to the hitchhiker was not encouraging. ‘We’ll give you a lift if you want,’ she said. ‘But honestly I wouldn’t get in this car with us. For a start, the thing’s a wreck. The lights aren’t working. We don’t know what’s happened to them. We’ve already had one crash, and it was all my fault because I can’t...