SIMON MORRISON is a professor of music and Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University.He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books and has written for Time Magazine, New York Review of Books, and New York Times. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds a PhD and an MFA in Music History from Princeton University.

A marvellous book ... It takes huge imaginative vision and a deep on-the-ground knowledge of Moscow, acquired over many years, to grasp the full dynamism of the city’s history. But Simon A Morrison has pulled it off. His ambitious, erudite account is vivid and compelling, a wonderful conjuring up of Russia’s great capital in all its beauty, fire and fury