The painter Malvina Cheek was 100 years old last Wednesday. Yesterday she lay on a reclining chair while her friends from the neighbourhood went in to see her and to admire the card from the Queen, all of them feeling very moved that they were with someone who was born on 8th July 1915. Here is a 1980s self-portrait: in some ways she does not look so very different now – although she is a good deal paler and thinner.

Moscow is full of wonderfully restored detail which sometimes puts the British visitor to shame – would a lamppost like this be so beautifully restored in the UK or would it have been replaced by some neon 1970s monstrosity? The latter more like.

The toilet at the Gum Department Store  is indeed very lovely, with chrome and marble and wooden loo seats.

A beautiful frieze in Moscow, presumably of Russian workers, it’s quite hard to tell, but the quality of the carving is remarkable – and there are many carvings like this all over the city.

On the same street as the Chekhov statue (cf. the Post last week) there is a branch of Le Pain Quotidian. For the European, Russia is such an extraordinary mixture of the familiar and the completely different.

Some Russian holiday snaps this week on the Post, but only five, which is better than the 635 or whatever that Pat and Tony on The Archers are inflicting on their friends. This is the kind of mural/sculpture that one sees a lot of; yet it’s quite hard to know how to react because the non-Russian has such conflicted feelings about it. On the other hand many of us are not so keen on the statues of generals on horseback which can be seen all over central London, although we pass them by without a second glance.

The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow has the famous Portrait of an Unknown Woman 1883 by Ivan Kramskoy, which has been used as the cover for several editions of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 1873-7. Here is a good piece by James Meek replying to the question: ‘What is it about Anna Karenina that gives it special status among the great novels?’