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“... Very Private Life is the second and final part of a 1100-page counterblast to King’s book by Nikolai Tolstoy, the second Mrs O’Brian’s son from her marriage to Count Dimitri Tolstoy, the man she left for O’Brian. Under the terms of the divorce the younger Tolstoy, who was ...”

“... equanimity he finds at Henry’s court, and between a biographer who dedicates his book to Nikolai Tolstoy, and who allows its dust-jacket to reveal that its author once resigned from a post as archivist ‘in protest’ on a point of principle, and the supreme politician and careerist of the early 16th century, who would surely never have ...”

“... Turgenev could be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness’, as Virginia Woolf put it ...”

“... If the world could write by itself,’ Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and country, high society and hunting, the salon and the racetrack, home and abroad, it would have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina ...”

“... father and mother (he was not yet born) moved inland to escape the danger. At this time Tolstoy was writing his Sevastopol Sketches, and Bartlett suggests (no reference is given) that many years later, when Tolstoy had become ‘something of a paternal figure’ for the younger writer, ‘the war would be a ...”

“... of Human Rights had considered this a good reason for reducing the £1.5m damages awarded against Nikolai Tolstoy for libelling Lord Aldington. But while there is every reason to stifle the notion that falsehoods can be comfortably accommodated under Article 10 so long as the price is right, excessive levels of damages and, as the House of Lords ...”

“... The​ National Portrait Gallery’s Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (until 26 June) displays a small but rich body of works made between 1867 and 1914, focused on Russia’s writers, artists, actors, composers and patrons, most of whom will be familiar – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov ...”

“... Tolstoys and, at 63, performed the can-can for the children. ‘Turgenev – the can-can. Sad,’ Tolstoy wrote in his diary. Most of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune ...”

“... technically a member of the noble class. Though much less exalted in rank than his contemporary Tolstoy, he was nonetheless a young master in a master-and-slave society of extreme piety, superstition, prejudice and social polarisation, learning of the blurred boundaries between the three worlds of peasant consciousness: the immanent world of folk ...”

“... person’, is sumasshedshy, literally ‘who was going out of their mind’. Sofia Andreyevna Tolstoy, wife of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, did go out of her mind at the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana in 1910. She didn’t lose her mind. She went back to it later, and lived another nine years. But she did lose her ...”

“... Tolstoy was much preoccupied with questions of identity. His brutally penetrating intelligence, as well as the instinctive self-confidence of an aristocrat, were always running incredulously up against the fact of existence, and the certainty of non-existence. What and who was he at different moments of the day? One of his earliest attempts at writing is a history of 24 hours, a record of his various selves during that period ...”

“... to perfection, although he indicates it in his usual untidy series of negligent touches. Tolstoy learnt a great deal from Stendhal, creating in Pierre and Prince André totally assembled and computed characters in the same style. Tolstoy also, as authors habitually do, learnt how to describe battle, not from his ...”

“... When, in War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under him, there is ‘around him nothing but the still earth and the stubble ...”

“... an atomic bomb. That reactor was designed to meet Kurchatov’s requirements by the engineer Nikolai Dollezhal and was built at the record speed considered advisable when responding to Stalin’s orders. With important modifications, it was this model – cooled by water, the processes moderated by graphite – that gave rise to the huge RBMK-1000 ...”

“... was likened to every Russian writer one can call to mind, with the exception, as far as I know, of Tolstoy. Well, now Tolstaya writes again, and the italics have become capital letters The new collection, Sleepwalker in a Fog, consists of seven stories; the first of them, the title piece, is almost long enough to be called a novella, and at 60 pages the final ...”