Grigory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant-turned-mystic, was as fascinating as he was unfathomable. He played the role of the simple man, eating with his fingers and boasting, 'I don't even know my ABC...' But, as the only person able to relieve the sy…
Grigory Rasputin, Siberian peasant-turned-mystic and court sage, was as fascinating as he was unfathomable. In this riveting and eye-opening short biography, Frances Welch turns her inimitable wry gaze on one of the great mysteries of Russian histor…
The British and Russian royal families had just three full meetings before the Romanovs' tragic end in 1918. In The Imperial Tea Party, Frances Welch draws back the curtain on those fraught encounters, which had far-reaching consequences for 20th-ce…
Russia and Britain were never natural bedfellows. But the marriage, in 1894, of Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter, Alicky, to the Tsarevich Nicholas marked the beginning of an uneasy Anglo-Russian entente that would last until the Russian Rev…
Sydney Gibbes was appointed tutor to the children of Tsar Nicholas II in 1908 and over the next six years lived as one of the family in the royal palace. A demanding, fastidious man, he found the Romanovs bizarrely devout and insular. Yet he came to…
Did the 17-year-old Anastasia survive the massacre of the Russian Royal family in 1917? The possibility that she, the youngest of the Tsar's four daughters, might have escaped, and the longing to salvage some thread of hope from the tragedy, provide…
On 11th April 1919, less than a year after the assassination of the Romanovs, the British battleship HMS Marlborough left Yalta carrying the Russian Imperial Family into perpetual exile. The Russian Court at Sea vividly recreates this unlikely voyag…
