Laurence Kelly Bücher

Writer, cavalry officer, celebrity – Mikhail Lermontov moved in an atmosphere of political intrigue and personal recklessness, producing works considered second only to Pushkin’s in Russian literature and a career which has often been compared to Byron’s.

Istanbul, ancient heart of modern Turkey, has its mythological origins in the 7th century BC. Founded as Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire by Constantine the Great, during the 1000-year Byzantine empire that followed it was a city of fabled riches. This book includes coronation of a Byzantine emperor.

Inhabited since Neolithic times but not founded until 1147, the turbulent grown of Moscow is recorded through the voices of visitors and residents, including Peter the Great's bloody reprisals after the 1698 revolt, Napoleon's ignominious retreat in 1812, to the profusion of jewels in the Treasury of the Kremlin.

Essays and selections from novels, biographies, letters, and diaries describe the history of Moscow from its founding to the rise of Lenin, in 1917