Her friend and fellow poet Marina Tsvetaeva coined the phrase for Anna Akhmatova with which Elaine Feinstein titles this admirable and often moving biography. There is a faint touch of malice in the resounding phrase, and perhaps just a hint of comradely cattiness, and yet it fits its subject with a more than imperial respect.

As Elaine Feinstein says, Anna invented herself. A rather homelier parallel from English poetry would be W B Yeats, with his insistence on referring to the ‘great houses’ that he visited and the ‘half-legendary men’ of his ancestry. But Yeats, in style and self-projection, is a vulgarian compared to Anna