While I applaud the author’s willingness to engage with his readers, it would have been much better had Harding explained this in greater depth in the book itself. In one corner of the ground, less garishly clad and very much quieter, a small throng of visiting Russian supporters struggled to make their voices heard.

Luke Harding served as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, and ran into enough trouble there to provide material for his 2011 book, The Mafia State.He later told friends he’d had no idea the division was under the command of the KGB, although the fact that it bore the name of that organization’s founder, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, may have been something of a clue. Now he was a martyr, condemned by foes unknown to an agonizing death in a hospital bed many miles from home; now he would lie in foreign soil, in an airtight casket to preserve his body for a thousand years. The one thing they all had in common was nuisance value in varying degrees - to the Russian State/Putin.

There is discussion of Polonium’s properties, it’s incredible toxicity, but nothing to adequately explain this fact. Whilst I can see that the authors were extremely anxious to publish all the evidence that they had and reveal this shocking story of choreographed wars and the establishment of the gangster state, this vitally important book would have benefitted greatly by some severe editing and restructuring to make it more readable and accessible. While serving in the army, he was temporarily attached to a counter-intelligence unit tasked with tracing the hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons that were causing havoc across the Soviet Union.While they found two unassuming motiveless assassins, Andrei Lugovoi and Dimity Kovton knew little of their tradecraft.

Despite a foreign hostile power having the temerity to murder someone in London with a deadly substance, the UK government took almost no action other than condemning it; it is a terrible shame on this country that David Cameron’s government still believed that Putin could be ‘brought on side’. That is why people who try to expose the criminality in Russia and tell the The names of Boris Berezovsky and a mysterious Italian wheeler-dealer, Mario Scaramella, will figure prominently, together with those Russians already named, and there is at times some conflict between the various versions of events. In Russia, where corruption and hidden criminality pervade the business world, the need for thorough investigation is all the more important. They had known one another since childhood days; they had grown up in the same neighbourhood, in the same apartment block, and trained together at the elite Soviet Military Command Academy in Moscow in the mid-1980s.

Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph - `As vivid condemnation of the Putin regime as has yet been written. Alexander Litvinenko's case is handled with grace and sensitivity at all times, highlighting the importance for his story to be told. There’s a lot of complicated relationships, political structures, intelligence talk – yet he makes it all so accessible to the average reader, while also never neglecting detail and information. This is a shocking real-life revenge tragedy with corruption and subterfuge at every turn, and walk-on parts from Russian mafia, the KGB, MI6 agents, dedicated British coppers, Russian dissidents.

Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB spy who was fatally poisoned in London. That conclusion, coming nearly 10 years after the murder, seems like a good occasion for the publication of a book that sums up not only what we know about the crime but also how we came to know it. It came to me that all the times I had met Berezovsky it was always inside, away from the light – under the fluorescent strips of his claustrophobic Down Street office or at the shielded corner table of the Al Hamra restaurant with his bodyguards surrounding us, watching all the doors at once. He spent his youth and most of his adult career being loyal to the authorities in his country, whoever they were: first to the communists, then to Boris Yeltsin’s reformers, and then to the hardline autocracy imposed by Vladimir Putin, Sasha’s former boss at the FSB. Kovtun graduated in 1986, Lugovoy in 1987, and both went straight into the Kremlin Regiment of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, charged with the protection of senior state officials in the government and party.But even Lugovoi, on the surface a much more likely hired killer, having served as a Kremlin bodyguard, appears to have been little more than an oaf.