Vanora Bennett is a leader-writer for the London Times. She previously worked as Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Her first book, Crying Wolf (Macmillan, updated 2001), was about the Chechen war; her second is The Taste of Dreams: an obsession with Russia and caviar (Review, 2003).

Recent articles

The roots of Jacob Sonntag’s fifty-year old vision of a Yiddish-English literary marriage remain strong as the journal he founded extends its life in a different kind of multicultural Britain.

A toxic mixture of dams, pollution, smuggling, greed and post-Soviet collapse is driving the sturgeon to extinction. The fate of caviar, finds Vanora Bennett, is written in the recent history of the Caspian region.

The fierce post-Soviet conflict between the small Caucasian republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is also one between geographies of the mind. The landlocked Armenians, condemned to history, better fighters, have the land; the Azeris have oil, sturgeon, and a Promethean shoreline. In an extract from ‘The Taste of Dreams: an obsession with Russia and caviar’, Vanora Bennett evokes the mysterious alchemy of the Caspian Sea.