'The Tajiks are unnervingly friendly. They take the Islamic injunction of hospitality with grave seriousness. The hungry often sacrifice their only cow for a backpacker with a camera, and the regime has liberally welcomed boots and bases on its soil.'

'Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s and 1930s, he peerlessly described how Berlin's 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution.'

Nearly twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains markedly different to its Western neighbours. There are signs, however, that the values it aspires to are increasingly European

'The Chechen Islamists who struck Russia in March have discovered the benefits of going viral on the internet'