Enticing characters abound in Amor Towles’s novel A Gentleman in Moscow, set in post-Revolutionary Russia. Among them is Moscow’s lively old Metropol Hotel, in which the story takes place. However, for the most alluring personality, we vote for Anna Urbanova, a willowy film star who has a habit, under certain circumstances, of dropping her clothing to the floor of her hotel suite. Blouses, dresses. Rather than being shocked, we wonder, instead, how we might look doing the same thing. And which of Jane’s Vanity’s seductive garments we might choose.
