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“... to loved ones’ is Benn’s description – not even the layman thinks that’s poetry. Poetry, Anna Akhmatova said, ‘is made from all sorts of rubbish’. ‘There is nothing that is not memorable,’ Muñoz Molina says, and then we get a half-page list of things that were found on Ray when he was finally picked up at Heathrow Airport on 8 June 1968 ...”

“... It is this which allows Gumilev to sally forth, with courage and imagination worthy of the son of Anna Akhmatova, to conquer the vast empty terrain at the heart of our current historiography of the Medieval Mongols through a daring application of two main strategies: first, a close comparison of surviving clues as to Mongol activities at any point in ...”

“... Writers’ Union train, a journey during which Markus sometimes took the bread ration to an ailing Anna Akhmatova. Wolf was sent by the Party to the Comintern school to prepare for the liberation of Germany, then back to Moscow, where he worked for the German-language radio service and first met future GDR leaders like Walter Ulbricht. After 1945, a job ...”

“... and Russian culture in exile. Members of the old intelligentsia who remained in the country – Anna Akhmatova, for example – suffered years of material hardship and cultural ostracism. They represented the Russia that the Bolsheviks wished to transform, spiritually as well as materially, with some of Peter’s zeal. ‘Trotsky waxed lyrical on the ...”

“... which they find unconvincing, while they are moved by Pasternak, particularly by his elegy for Anna Akhmatova, which Lowell translates: You ache for the calm reaches of Ladoga, then hurry off to the lake for a change of fatigue. You gain nothing, the shallows smell like closets full of last summer’s clothes. The dry wind dances like a dried-out ...”

“... Strange Gods’.I’ve kept for last Isaiah Berlin’s most luminous moment: his encounter with Anna Akhmatova in St Petersburg, as it was called when Berlin first saw it and as it is again called today. When he made his visit in November 1945, as a First Secretary at the British Embassy, it was called Leningrad and had, under that name, resisted and ...”

“... girl, Tanaquil Le Clercq, who plunges her hands – her all – fatally into long black gloves (Anna Akhmatova: ‘In black memory you’ll find, fumbling,/A glove to the elbow that unlocks/A Petersburg night’). She is self-dramatising in 1960’s Liebeslieder Walzer (the Violette Verdy role) and dreaming her destiny in 1977’s Vienna Waltzes (the ...”

“... reading The Guest from the Future by György Dalos, an account of Isaiah Berlin’s visit to Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in November 1945 and its disastrous repercussions on Akhmatova’s career, or, at any rate, on her relations with the authorities. Neither the poet nor the philosopher comes out of it particularly ...”

“... how Sophia Parnok, the lesbian with whom Tsvetaeva had a passionate brief fling, wrote. Not how Akhmatova wrote, not even in the ‘martial’ poems with which she sought to stiffen Soviet spines during Hitler’s invasion. Not how Karolina Pavlova, a contemporary of Pushkin’s and a forerunner treasured by Tsvetaeva, wrote. Those who write about Tsvetaeva ...”

“... in Britain, and susceptible to an overstatement the opposite of the reticence and irony of Akhmatova, for instance, whom he has translated memorably. When the poet’s subject is the survival of poetry he reflects obliquely a vanity of his own (one which may license the writing of poems about his penis). ‘The life of a great man is ...”

“... understate central aspects of each: the simple chauvinism of War and Peace, the mysticism in Anna Karenina, the agrarian socialism of the Bell, the declared utilitarianism of On Liberty. The result is to make each sound somewhat closer to their commentator than it really is. His readings of Vico and Herder, the major subjects of his later work, show the ...”