Before emigrating, she participated in saving the Solzhenitsyn Archive after his arrest, miraculously escaping repression herself. In exile, she worked for the renowned Ardis publishing house and was a BBC journalist during its golden age. In perestroika-era Moscow, she witnessed and participated in the era of free speech... Masha Slonim's long-awaited memoir is a spy thriller, a dramatic...

He is recognized as a great inventor and one of the founders of modern electrical engineering, but it is unlikely that only these merits could generate a huge interest in both his work and his personality. He earned millions, but died in poverty, patented more than 800 inventions, but he was considered the 'greatest charlatan' and 'genius madman', was at the origins of the invention of radio...

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his...

Leonid Andreyev’s work continues to spark debate among critics. For some, his writings represent ‘exemplary depravity’; others discern in them ‘a powerful breath of talent.’ But what was the writer truly like—a cold cynic or a sensitive, vulnerable soul? Why, despite being a patriot, did he reject the Revolution? Why did he attempt suicide? The answers lie in this new biography.

On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky invited a man he knew only as Jacques Mornard into his study. Mornard waited for Trotsky to sit, then smashed an ice pick he had hidden in his raincoat into Trotsky’s skull. For over a decade, Trotsky’s greatest enemy, Joseph Stalin, had been trying to arrange his murder. Stalin’s agents had hunted him across Europe and into a lonely, bitter exile in Mexico. He...