Catherine Merridale, author of Ivan’s War, calls this definitive history, “attractive, engaging, and very intelligent….Established fans of the Russian empress will find plenty of new material and those who are meeting her for the first time will be dazzled.”

    The text, which follows Nicholas & Alexandria from their childhood's to the Siberian cellar where their lives ended, is complemented by rare images from the imperial family's private collections (locked away for decades in Soviet archives, & published here for the first time), as well as by contemporary full-color photographs of the places & palaces the Romanovs knew.

    Mikhail Gorbachev, a sophisticated and urbane reformer, sought to modernize and preserve the USSR; Boris Yeltsin, a coarse and a hard drinking “bulldozer,” wished to destroy the union and create a capitalist Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt, carried out by hardline communists, shook Gorbachev’s authority and was a triumph for Yeltsin. But it took four months of intrigue and double-dealing before the Soviet Union finally collapsed, and the day arrived when Yeltsin could hustle Gorbachev out of the Kremlin, and move in as ruler of Russia.Conor O’Clery has written a unique and truly suspenseful thriller of the day the Soviet Union died. The internal power plays, the shifting alliances, the betrayals, the mysterious three colonels carrying the briefcase with the nuclear codes, and the jockeying to exploit the future are worthy of John Le Carré or Alan Furst. The Cold War’s last act was a magnificent dark drama played out in the shadows of the Kremlin.

    The book reveals the facts about his suspended prison sentence, his dispute with the group over unpaid royalties and his retiring from the music industry, and his rumoured heroin addiction.Written with the full co-operation of Grant's family and friends to give a unique access into the most fabled and feared man in the music business.

    It speaks of those who loved and betrayed him; of charming ladies and brilliant men around him; of his greatness and of the crafty stupidity of his contemporaries; os the wit and folly of his times; and of the struggle of men and ideas when faced with the march of history. Based on extensive research and original sources, The Sword of Tipu Sultan is an original contribution to historical literature which gives insights into the character of its hero, and the period in which he lived.Tipu, maligned by historians as a cruel and bigoted ruler, emerges here as a humane, enlightened ruler who believes that God is not confined to any one religion and that all religions therefore require equal respect. He was opposed to colonialism; welcomed the American Declaration of Independence and applauded the spirit of the French Revolution. The author establishes him as the first among modern Indian nationalists who knew also that India was weakened not by outside powers but by sickness, decadence and disunity within.The novel vividly portrays the drama of Tipu's times and recaptures the amazing spirit of the man who in the midst of disaster lost neither his dignity nor his love nor his faith in the values he cherished. He chose to court death when he could have saved himself, for he firmly believed that his sacrifice would serve as an example for the future generations of India.

    Josiah’s nephew Tom journeys to America to buy clay from the Cherokee for this exquisite china. Tom is caught up in the American rebellion, and falls for a Cherokee woman who will come to play a crucial role in Josiah’s late, great creation – the Portland Vase. A novel of epic scope, rich in warmth, intellect and humanity, The Potter’s Hand explores the lives and loves of a great British dynasty, whose travails are both ordinary – births, deaths, marriages, opium addiction, depression – and utterly extraordinary.

    Pavlichenko was World War II's best scoring sniper and had a varied wartime career that included trips to England and America.In June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, she left her university studies, ignored the offer of a position as a nurse, to become one of Soviet Russia's 2000 female snipers.Less than a year later she had 309 recorded kills, including 29 enemy sniper kills. She was withdrawn from active duty after being injured. She was also regarded as a key heroic figure for the war effort.She spoke at rallies in Canada and the US and the folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song, 'Killed By A Gun' about her exploits. Her US trip included a tour of the White House with FDR. In November 1942 she visited Coventry and accepted donations of £4,516 from Coventry workers to pay for three X-ray units for the Red Army. She also visited a Birmingham factory as part of her fundraising tour.She never returned to combat but trained other snipers. After the war, she finished her education at Kiev University and began a career as a historian. She died on October 10, 1974 at age 58, and was buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.

    Capt. Delano boards the San Dominick, providing needed supplies, and tries to learn from her aloof and disturbed captain, Benito Cereno, the story of how this ship came to be where she is. Dealing with racism, the slave trade, madness, the tension between representation and reality, and featuring at least one unreliable narrator, Melville's novella has both captivated and frustrated critics for decades.

    Written by the world's leading authority on Rasputin, this new biography draws on previously closed Soviet archives to offer new information on Rasputin's relationship with Empress Alexandra, sensational revelations about his sexual conquests, a re-examination of his murder, and more.Based on long-closed Soviet archives and the author's decades of research, encompassing sources ranging from baptismal records and forgotten police reports to notes written by Rasputin and personal lettersReveals new information on Rasputin's family history and strange early life, religious beliefs, and multitudinous sexual adventures as well as his relationship with Empress Alexandra, ability to heal the haemophiliac tsarevich, and moreIncludes many previously unpublished photos, including contemporary studio photographs of Rasputin and samples of his handwritingWritten by historian Joesph T. Fuhrmann, a Rasputin expert whose 1990 biography Rasputin: A Life was widely praised as the best on the subjectSynthesizing archival sources with published documents, memoirs, and other studies of Rasputin into a single, comprehensive work, Rasputin: The Untold Story will correct a century's worth of misconception and error about the life and death of the famous Siberian mystic and healer and the decline and fall of Imperial Russia.

    He vowed not to run a negative campaign. He would focus on policies, not personalities. He would not be beholden to big money. He would actually make America great. Weaver also shows how they overcame significant challenges: A media that thrived on negative campaigns. A party that thrived on personalities. And a political system that thrived on big money. Weaver explains how Bernie beat them all and, in doing so, went from having little national name recognition when he entered to the race to being one of the most respected and well-known people in the world by its end--because, Weaver argues, Bernie won the race.He moved the discussion from the concerns of the 1% to those of the 99%. He forced the Democrats to remember their populist roots. And he showed that an outsider with real ideas and ways to get them done was more popular than someone propped up by backroom political sugar daddies.From holding bags of "Bernie buttons" and picket-stick signs, to managing thousands of campaign workers, to looking ahead to 2020, Weaver chronicles the birth of a revolution that didn't end in November 2016. It's only just begun.

    They included the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, and his sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia, Prince Felix Youssupov, the murderer of Rasputin and a man once mooted as a future leader of Russia, and Grand Duke Nicholas, former Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armies.As the ship prepared to set sail, a British sloop carrying 170 White Russian soldiers drew up alongside. The soldiers stood on deck and sang the Russian National Anthem. It was the last time the anthem was sung to members of the Imperial Family within Russian territory for over 70 years. The Dowager Empress stood on deck alone. Nobody dared to approach her.The Russian Court at Sea vividly recreates this unlikely voyage, with its bizarre assortment of warring characters and its priceless cargo of treasures, including rolled-up Rembrandts and Faberge eggs. It is a story, by turns exotic, comic and doomed, of an extraordinary group of people caught up in an extraordinary moment in history when their lives were in every way at sea.

    Bertram Wolfe, a political scientist and historian of Russia, knew Trotsky and Stalin personally, and here brings his profound insider's knowledge to bear on his subjects. Three Who Made a Revolution recounts the early lives and influences of the three leaders, and shows the development of their diverging ideologies as decades gave strength to their cause and brought Russia closer to its turning point, a revolution that would alter the course of the twentieth century.

    Brought up in Russia but taken on visits to Scotland, Eugenie Fraser marvelously evokes a child's reactions to two totally different environments, sets of customs, and family backgrounds. With the events of 1914 to 1920—the war with Germany, the Revolution, the murder of the Tsar, and the withdrawal of the Allied Intervention in the north—came the disintegration of Russia and of family life. The stark realities of hunger, deprivation, and fear are sharply contrasted with the adventures of childhood. The reader shares the family's suspense and concern about the fates of its members and relives with Eugenie her final escape to Scotland.

    Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.Miranda Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men--damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George--and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria--grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third--whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy "arch-vulgarian" who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect.For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

    With colorful prose Suzanne Massie details the variety of Russian existence--tsars and serfs and merchant-princes and babushkas--no stone is left uncovered as she cross-references nearly a thousands years, writing with equal consideration of art, poetry, country-life, court-life, politics and its myriad games, myths and legends, influence "outside the sphere."