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“... into the hell of the fallen-from-grace after turning up for a scattered, uncelebrated protest in Pushkin Square; Sinyavsky and Daniel were standing trial; and Vladimir Bukovsky, having served over a year in a psychiatric hospital for possessing a copy of Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, was about to go to the camps for protesting against the arrest of ...”

“... and then to master it: explorers such as Karl Ernst von Baer, Ferdinand von Wrangel and Alexander von Middendorff (many were Baltic Germans, for some reason) were succeeded a generation later by engineers planning the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Permafrost Institute was founded in 1941, by which time Soviet scientists had developed a ...”

“... wrote memoirs that serve as a foil to the high-mindedness of everyone else; the cultural official Alexander Arosev, a close friend of the head of the government, Vyacheslav Molotov; Aron Solts, the party’s morality expert; Valentin Trifonov, a Civil War military hero; Karl Radek, sometime oppositionist who for some years returned to favour with Stalin as an ...”

“... Russia had been reconstituted from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the Russian Vice-President, Alexander Rutskoi, wrote in tones of patriotic despair about the queues for Moscow’s first McDonald’s, on Pushkin Square: the death of his country’s culture was taking place in the square named after its most famous ...”

“... on Dostoevsky the writer, and Carr had a great blind spot when it came to the religious side. The Pushkin memorial speech of 1880, a famous set-piece of conservatism and orthodoxy, is dismissed as ‘nebulous ... obsolete ... platitudinous’. Still, Carr’s Dostoevsky survives in a way that the effusions on the subject of Lawrence, Gide or even Berdyaev do ...”

“... who soon showed a talent for acting and a bossy taste for leadership. He discovered books and let Pushkin, Belinsky, Gogol and above all Lermontov blow his adolescent mind, while winning approval in the Komsomol youth movement. A girlfriend remembered that ‘he was too energetic, too serious, so organised’. The Red Banner award contributed to his ...”