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“... of the liberal intelligentsia – both those who had remained within the official fold, like Yevtushenko, and those who had not, like Sakharov. When the anti-Stalinist organisation Memorial was founded in 1988 both men joined its leadership. For Sakharov, Memorial was less important than the battles he fought with other dissident colleagues for the ...”

“... Yevtushenko’s face, more cadaverous by the year, stares morosely from the flap of Wild Berries. The camera has evidently caught him thinking of his native Taiga, the Siberian tundra which forms the idyllic background to the novel. In fact, the background of Wild Berries, which is not the best ordered of narratives, rather usurps the foreground, and for much of its length the novel reads like over-the-top Intourist travel literature, aimed at rehabilitating a region associated in the foreign mind (at least) with exile, sub-zero temperatures and days in the life of Soviet dissidents ...”

“... fabulously rich actual owner of the place hires him as a butler. This leads to an encounter with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom he despises, but who’s bowled over by It’s Me, Eddie and recommends it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who considers publishing it at City Lights but decides not to. At one of Limonov’s many rock-bottom ‘turning points’, Pauvert ...”

“... has been at the Maryinsky/Kirov for 18 years, Grigorovich was at the Bolshoi for 30 and the late Yevgeny Mravinsky ran the St Petersburg Philharmonic for an astonishing 50 years. Such regimes were naturally conservative and authoritarian, but they created a disciplined environment in which talent could be nurtured. For Russian audiences, the conclusion is ...”