The writer and journalist of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a regular guest on many television shows, who wrote 13 books about intelligence officers, which were also published in the ZhZL series and became bestsellers, this time turned to the memoir genre. There are so many names in this book! You can’t read anywhere else about what his father told him about his contemporaries Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Shostakovich. The author himself was friends with the writer Vladimir Maksimov and the illusionist Emil Keogh, the pianist Emil Gilels, the composer Alexander Tsfasman, the actor Nikolai Karachentsov, and in Paris he met the great Francoise Sagan. Worked in Iran and France, studied in Scotland. In the first days of the Chernobyl tragedy, he worked in a 30-kilometer closed zone. And how many meetings at thirteen Olympics! The result is a small encyclopedia of life in the Soviet era and the beginning of the current one.