So many competent, sometimes excellent exposés of Vladimir Putin’s crimes and misdemeanours have appeared in English over the last ten years that he himself might consider hiring a ghostwriter to produce a retaliatory diatribe. Catherine Belton’s, Luke Harding’s and Joshua Yaffa’s books share the same view of contemporary Russia, more or less accepting that the country is in the autocratic grip of a mercenary, vindictive, secretive and remorseless dictator, transported like Cinderella from a communal flat with only two hours’ access to a kitchen per day to a palace the previous tenants of which have included Grand Duke Sergei and his wife, one blown up by a socialist revolutionary in 1905, the other buried alive by Bolsheviks in a mine shaft. The three books are complementary, taking different approaches, though there is some overlap: all of them catalogue Putin’s ‘kills’, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

Belton’s work is exceptionally detailed and complex: as befits a Financial Times journalist, she has a forensic accountant’s ability to follow the thirty-year money trail, showing how, following the collapse of the USSR, the Communist Party’s hard-currency funds were appropriated by entrepreneurs and fraudsters, whose ‘banks’ funded Boris Yeltsin’s regime