Anna Akhmatova's was one of the most dramatic lives in the history of poetry. She lived through the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 when she was 16 and 28. Her ex-husband was executed when she was 32. Stalin had her son repeatedly imprisoned as part of a campaign of persecution against her. No sooner was the war over than Akhmatova was vilified in public in 1946 as the epitomy of the anti-State artist and intellectual. Nearly twenty years later, Akhmatova, begowned in the purple of a Doctor of Literature, stood next to Siegfried Sassoon in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre to hear the Public Orator compare her to Sappho.