Owen Matthews remembers the oligarch he knew, whose wealth and power seemed to bend the world around him.
It’s hard to write fiction about Russia: reality stubbornly keeps all the best plots and characters for itself. No writer could have invented Boris Abramovich Berezovsky: a mathematician who became a billionaire, a boy from a modest Jewish family who became the Kremlin’s grey cardinal and Russia’s kingmaker – a man who in his exile in London became the centre of Polonium poisoning plots that even Ian Fleming would have found outlandish.
