Laurence Kelly Books

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.

In this first biography of Alexander Griboyedov in English, Laurence Kelly paints a vivid picture of a man of remarkable literary talent and diplomatic gifts that were nevertheless overshadowed by ill-fortune. Involved in the 1825 Decembrist plot to overthrow the Tsarist state and the mission to further Russia's expansionist agenda in the Caucasus, the famous writer was eventually murdered by zealous mobs in Tehran. This book makes an invaluable contribution to the diplomatic history of Russia, the Caucasus and Iran at the same time illuminating the life and works of a writer who was among ninteenth-century Russia's most respected and prominent writers.

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