Boris Berezovsky has plenty of time for reading these days. In March, Berezovsky was arrested and released on bail in London after Russian authorities issued an extradition warrant charging him with fraud. The once powerful oligarch who expertly navigated the corridors of Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin, and helped advance Vladimir Putin's career before falling out with him, is thus restricted to the UK. He can thus only watch as the oil company he helped create - Sibneft - merges with Yukos to create a world oil giant.

He has lived in the genteel ambience of Wentworth Park, a 240-acre estate in the heart of Surrey, for 18 months, yet most of the objects in the house, including many of the leather-bound books in the wood-panelled library, are relics of its previous owners. Berezovsky may own the house, but he does not seem to belong in it.

His favourite book is Other Shores, the memoirs of Russia's greatest literary nomad, Vladimir Nabokov. "It resonates with my own life," he says. "I first read it when I was 21 but now, unable to return to Russia, I feel this book particularly acutely." Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago on the other hand, which defined an entire generation of samizdat-reading Russian intelligentsia, did not have much of an impact. "I was always more interested in the form and the language than in the content."