In The Spectator this week, Viv Groskop reviews Mud and Stars (Jonathan Cape), in which Sara Wheeler travels through Russia with the writers of the Golden Age — from Pushkin to Tolstoy — as her guides. It is, she says, “a painfully honest account, rose-tinted spectacles firmly placed to one side, and there is something compelling about Wheeler’s darkly passionate tone… It’s a complicated, bleak romance that mirrors the love-hate relationship many of the great writers had with their own country and people.”