This week’s lunch with the FT features Peter Aspden sitting down for some sushi and a harmless bit of obsequiousness with Evgeny Lebedev, the son of Alexander Lebedev.  The conversation has some interesting points … such as his potshots at newly wealthy Russians who throw their money at expensive art.  Evgeny strikes me as more intelligent and considerate than your average playboy – but then at other times he seems a bit out of touch.

“I feel very affiliated with Russia, what I see as its soul. Even with its landscape, that vastness that you can’t grasp. Our history is violent and bloody: revolutions, war, turmoil. Even Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, they saw themselves as reformers but, on the other hand, they were brutal. Catherine used to write to Rousseau and Voltaire but then she had people’s noses chopped off.

“I do have a melancholic side to my character, which is Russian. But what I feel no connection with at all is Moscow. It is a place that has become completely driven by money and power. There is no part of it that has not been destroyed to make way for architecture of diabolical design.