“Katherine read constantly. She loved biographies of male dictators and enjoyed a long Stalin phase when she became obsessed, not by the Gulags or by the Yalta Conference, but by his wife’s suicide, his taste for sweet Georgian wines, the way he made his ministers bark ‘The Blue Danube’ after dinner, like dogs. She quoted his daughter Svetlana, who said, ‘He was a Sagittarius, you know, on the cusp with Capricorn.”
