‘Strolling around Alexanderplatz one cold but sunny afternoon, I was surprised at just how trashy it is’

'One can become American but one can never become English'

‘Their grandparents fled the Nazis, their parents boycotted all things German, but their children are flocking to Berlin’

'Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s and 1930s, he peerlessly described how Berlin's 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution.'