Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at The New School (a university in New York city) and granddaughter of defunct Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, will publish, this year, a book about Vladimir Nabokov, Imagining Nabokov.

Hmm.

I discovered this little snippet of information while reading page 14 of today's The Australian. Unfortunately, the piece, about the deaths of dictators (spurred by the imminent demise of Fidel Castro), does not appear on the newspaper's Web site. It is available on the Project Syndicate Web site as well as on the Web sites of two other English-language papers: The Korea Herald and Pakistan's Daily Times.

As to the professor's interest in literature... She opens the piece with a reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez which, in itself, is ironic considering the friendship that exists between the two celebrities. The author and the politician have been friends for decades.