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“... I don’t trust Mr Solomon Volkov an inch, and as for Miss Antonina Bouis, the question of trust hardly arises: Shostakovich is supposed to have said that ‘Hamlet was screwing her’ (i.e. Ophelia) in Nikolai Pavlovich Akimov’s (1901–1968) production of Hamlet which, at the time (1932), ‘was highly regarded in the American literary press’ – or so Mr Volkov informs us ...”

“... edited in 1979 under the title Testimony by a thirtysomething Russian musicologist called Solomon Volkov, who by that time had left Moscow for a post at Columbia University. Volkov claimed to have compiled the book out of many meetings and conversations with the composer, and the text is couched in the form of ...”

“... don’t read the acknowledgments, where Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered and Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich are cited as sources. Barnes has done something of the kind before with The Porcupine, based on the trial of the Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov. John Banville did it in a roman à ...”

“... sacred war and our victory’. Everything miraculously changed in 1979, when a recent émigré, Solomon Volkov, smuggled out of the USSR the manuscript of a book that he described as Shostakovich’s memoirs. He called it Testimony, and represented its apparent author as a bitter anti-Stalinist, and a victim of the regime. Maxim ...”

“... were numb with disbelief. Lidochka drowned? ‘Lida was a marvellous swimmer,’ Balanchine told Solomon Volkov in the last months of his life. An investigation was half-hearted, then closed. Was it an accident or a plot? A crime of passion or a political murder? Most thought murder. Ivanova had moved in one circle too many, socialising with fans who ...”