Jeremy Noble was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he won a half-blue for polo, and drove a black Ferrari.

In the traditional way he has made and spent several fortunes, and now writes for a living.

He has lived in St Petersburg and in Moscow for a number of years.

He has been the Arts Editor for the St Petersburg News (Times), the Editor-in-Chief for Passport magazine in Moscow, a critic for the London Literary Review, and has written about dance for the Washington Post and Dance Magazine in New York.

For two seasons he co-presented the Kirov Ballet during its summer season at the Hermitage Theatre, the private theatre of the State Hermitage Museum. The dancers included some of the most talented Russian stars: Diana Vishneva, Farukh Ruzimatov, Andrei Batalov, Anastasia Volochkova.

He has written three publications about Russian ballet: Kirov Ballet; A Century of Russian Ballet, Diary 2000; and Millennium of Russian Ballet, Diary 2001; and also produced several calendars.

His first play Smith was seen off-off Broadway in New York. He has had two plays rejected so far by the National Theatre in London, and his latest play Marlene Made Me was shortlisted for the UK International Playwrighting Festival 2004, and is scheduled for a production in Moscow in 2005/6.

His first film work has been for the director Alexander Sokurov, writing the English-language dialogue for Sokurov's latest film The Sun (2004).

He is revising a play about a woman who lives in her car in Moscow; writing a new play called A Port in a Storm, set in the 18th century in St Petersburg (about the Peacock Clock); and also writing a screenplay about Yuri Gagarin, set in a hotel room in California (after Gagarin came back to Earth).

He writes advertising copy, and numbers amongst his clients luxury hotels, travel companies, and the City Administration of St Petersburg.

His publishing business produces notecards, postcards, posters, wrapping paper, address books, bookmarks and the like. He specialises in re-producing images of Russian culture, particularly Russian ballet and Russian opera. He is an admirer of Diaghilev and uses some of the images of the Ballets Russes in his printed publications. The Russian Avant-Garde immediately after the 1917 Revolution (up to 1932) is another speciality, and a new range of stationery and gifts will include images from this period.

For many years he has been buying and selling Russian collectibles and objets d'art.

He has been collecting Russian contemporary art also for many years, and buys and sells the works of the artists and photographers he likes and admires, such as the late Timur Novikov, Georgiy Guryanov, Nikolai Leontiev, Igor Baskakov and Serge Golovach.

Another View

"Then, at my new job I'm introduced to another expat, an Englishman, Jeremy Noble, a tall handsome Brit so completely the stereotypical upper class English intellectual/writer that I feel like I've inadvertently walked into a comedy by Coward. Trying to make a good impression, I stand up, lean forward, and thrust out my hand preparing for a textbook American business handshake of job-interview firmness. As I watch Jeremy back up a foot, and his face register a brief panic (looking at my hand in horrified fascination as though it were an exotic, possibly poisonous, insect), I recall too late one of my father's favorite quotations "If an Englishman offers you his hand, take it, it may never happen again." Jeremy does in fact shake my hand, but I can see him mentally chalking me up as pushy and rude, precisely because I did what is the accepted polite greeting in America. English distance is longer than American distance, and the accepted occasions for minor physical contact much fewer."

From The Costumer's Manifesto (www.costumes.org) by Tara Maginnis