‘Grandad knows full well that my mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, acclaimed as “the beautiful creole”, was surely the vainest woman in all of Russia and that she hated her middle child – moi! – because I alone had inherited something of the old Negro’s features, marking me out as pot ugly. She made my childhood hell. When the English artist Dawe wanted to paint me when I was older, I wrote a poem called “Mon Portrait” – it’s about how my African profile would last for centuries, only to be mocked by Mephistopheles – and showed it to my mother, telling her this is how she made me feel. Yes, it was all her fault.

‘She was so terribly distraught, which was of course my intention. Papa was no better. He had a monstrous temper and was a hopeless womanizer. Then that evil critic Faddei Bulgarin mocked my African grandfather in a literary gazette, to which I replied with the poem “My Genealogy”, all about how my black grandfather was close to the Tsar himself. Anyway, is it therefore surprising that I should seek out some black roots? Even if they are American, like your good self.’

‘No, I’m British,’ Stanley corrected him. ‘Of Jamaican parents, I might add.’

‘Dammit, Janet! This is so disappointing because those black Americans are just the grooviest people on the planet.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Stanley said, shaking his head. ‘Jamaicans are pretty cool too, you know.’

‘Sure, brother-man. If I was a Jamaican, I & I woulda been a Rasta, grow natty-dreads an’ live ina de hills.’

To his surprise, Stanley found his body spontaneously leaping into an uninhibited skank. He looked comical, with his long, spindly legs and arms sticking out at exaggerated, uncoordinated angles, as he trod the ground in what was supposed to be a rude-bwoy strut to accompany Pushkin’s arm-waving oratory.

‘I & I woulda worship His Imperial Majesty! Haile Selassie-I! King of Kings! Lord of Lords! Conquering Lion of Judah! Elect of God! Emperor of Ethiopia! I & I –’

‘Alexander,’ Ibrahim cut in impatiently.

‘Yes, Grampy?’

‘SHUT-UP!’

‘Why should I?’ He pulled a truculent face. ‘Yu cyan tell I & I wha’ fe do!’

‘Of course I can. To use modern parlance, you were a poncey writer during the time of imperial Russia; therefore stop deluding yourself that you could be anything else now.’

‘One who suffered the tragedy of childhood. One who was exiled for six years due to the seditious nature of my writing, who thereafter had every word censored by Tsar Nicholas himself.’