Jonathan Dimbleby is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's flagship programme of topical debate Any Questions? and its twin phone-in programme Any Answers?. He has presented ITV's flagship weekly political programme, Jonathan Dimbleby until the show ended on May 7th 2006. He is also ITV's anchorman on every General election night since 1997.

Starting his career as a reporter for Radio Bristol, he moved on to Radio 4 to present The World at One and The World This Weekend. He then became a reporter for Thames Television's This Week. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he worked prodigiously, reporting from around the world, and writing and presenting many major documentary series. He won the Richard Dimbleby Television Award in 1974. In 1988 he co-founded (and presented for five years) BBC TV's On the Record. His more recent documentaries include Charles The Private Man, the Public Role; An African Journey; A Kosovo Journey; and the series, The Last Governor.

He has written a number of best-selling books: RICHARD DIMBLEBY; THE PALESTINIANS, THE PRINCE OF WALES and THE LAST GOVERNOR.

He is President of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), the Soil Association, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; vice-President of Council for the Protection of Rural England; Council Member of the National Trust; a Trustee of the Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund; and Chairman of Bath Festivals Trust.

He combines his media career with running his organic farm and shop in Somerset.

Russia is a country in transition. It is a land of exotic treasures with a culture rich in world-famous artists, writers and musicians. It is a swiftly modernising economy yet still a place of corruption, suppression, and secrecy, shaking off its recent, bloody past of Communist dictatorship. Russia may no longer be seen to rival America, but with control over a huge portion of the world's remaining non-renewable energy resources, it is a rapidly rising energy super-power. Yet, shrouded in myth and ice, it is little understood by the rest of world.

Travelling thousands of miles, Jonathan journeys from Kaliningrad in the west to Provideniya in the east to discover modern Russia. Passing through some of the most extreme landscape on earth, several climates and across eleven time zones, he visits places - spectacular, infamous, secret - that witnessed defining moments in Russia's extraordinary history.The people that inhabit this vast landmass are as fascinating and diverse as the landscape. Caught between Asia and Europe, they are a mix of ethnicities, a product of Russian expansionism and their turbulent past.

In this book and the groundbreaking television series it accompanies, Jonathan looks at how Russia's past has shaped her current identity and investigates what modern Russia means to her people now.