Mark Ford
Sand sculpture inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Jesolo, Italy, 2009. All recent English-language versions of Dante’s Inferno—of which there are enough to fill a fair-sized ditch in Malebolge—come equipped with notes explaining Dante’s references to transgressors such as Farinata degli Uberti or Archbishop Ruggieri or Vanni Fucci or Michael Scot, this last being an enterprising Scottish […] 
Vladimir Nabokov was eighteen when the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 made his wealthy family’s continued residence in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed at the start of World War I) impossible. They fled first to the Crimea and then, in 1919, to London. The following year they settled in Berlin, where in 1922 Nabokov’s father was assassinated, more by accident than design, by extreme right-wing Russian monarchists: they were attempting to kill another Russian émigré politician, Paul Milyukov. V.D. Nabokov bravely seized and disarmed one of the gunmen, and pinned him down, but was then shot three times by