Netflix put its adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on indefinite hold, and an Italian university course on Fyodor Dostoevsky - the 19th century novelist exiled for defying the Russian state - was withdrawn before it was reinstated after a backlash.
The 60-year-old author - born in St Petersburg to Russian parents and assigned mandatory military service assisting the KGB - has been forced to flee his home in Kyiv with his English wife, Elizabeth, and their three children.
‘I've seen situations where we didn't speak to each other for six hours because someone was so angry. That's just the competitiveness of the house. There must be something in the Charles-Cook blood…'
‘With all great literature, like the great Russian masters, there is a sort of universality that resonates with people.
They write about the human condition and in reading them we realise that people from 19th century Russia - or indeed modern day Russia - have many of the same difficulties, hopes and dreams that we have in the west.'
World number one Belgian-Dutch racing driver Max Verstappen, 24, was pictured arriving at the paddock with girlfriend Kelly Piquet, 33 ahead of the third practice session of the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix
While his father played a bit of football, his uncle James Cook MBE held the British and European super-middleweight boxing belts in the early 1990s. When he retired after a 12-year career and 25 victories, he formed the renowned Pedro Youth Club as a haven for disadvantaged kids reared in the gang culture of Hackney's notorious ‘Murder Mile.'
Oldest brother Anthony is a midfielder with Cray Wanderers in the Isthmian League. Reice is a goalkeeper who, like Regan, started out with Arsenal and now plays with National League South Hampton & Richmond Borough. Two of his younger brothers, Roman and Reuben, are on the books of League Two Sutton United.
Of the six sons reared by their Jamaican and Grenadian parents, Charles-Cook was the most slightly built. Even so, he spent school holidays in his uncle's gym, where Dame Elizabeth Taylor was an unlikely patron until 2011. Any ambitions he harboured of a career in the boxing ring were curtailed by two things. One was his size and the other was the desire to follow in the footsteps of his two older siblings. Football came a good deal easier to all of them.
World champion Max Verstappen of Red Bull completes the front row as he launches his campaign for a second consecutive championship after the controversy surrounding his narrow victory at last season's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix which clinched his maiden win.
The company issued the original recall last week after receiving four complaints of babies being hospitalized with bacterial infections, one of whom died. Three of the complaints were for Cronobacter sakazakii, which can cause fever, poor feeding, excessive crying, low energy and other serious symptoms, according to the FDA. One complaint was for Salmonella Newport, which can cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps, along with other more severe side effects, including high fever.
Julie Bindel, a feminist campaigner, said: 'There are questions to be asked why single men, all of a sudden, want babies that they will be the sole parents for, when traditionally they have passed on the lion's share of caring responsibilities for children to women.'
It's hard to begrudge young men living 600 miles from home in an environment so remote from London that it might as well be the dark side of the moon, some home comforts. Not that Regan Charles-Cook necessarily feels any desperate pining need to return to the Big Smoke as soon as the Caledonian Sleeper will take him.
Some cultural bodies have prompted accusations of McCarthyism - the anti-Russian hysteria whipped up during the 1950s - for rushing to cancel Russian culture in response to Vladimir Putin's invasion order.
Somewhere along the way he has even managed to find a surrogate for the five brothers he left behind when he moved to the Scottish Highlands.
emotional resilience
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