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"Serge Diaghilev, the Russian impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, is often said to have invented modern ballet. An art critic and connoisseur, Diaghilev had no training in dance or choreography, but he had a dream of bringing Russian art, music, design, and expression to the West and a mission to drive a cultural and artistic revolution. Bringing together such legendary talents as Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, this complex and visionary genius created a new form of ballet defined by artistic integrity, creative freedom, and an all-encompassing experience of art, movement, and music. The Ballets Russes's explosive color combinations, sensual and androgynous choreography, and experimental sound was called ""barbaric"" by the Parisian press, but its radical style usurped the entrenched mores of traditional ballet. Diaghilev's Empire, the publication of which marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev's birth, is an impeccably researched and daring reassessment of the phenomenon of the Ballets Russes and the Russian Revolution in twentieth-century art and culture. Rupert Christiansen, the dance critic for the Spectator, explores the fiery conflicts, outsize personalities, and extraordinary artistic innovations that make up this story of triumph and disaster."

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Rupert Christiansen is the dance critic for the Spectator. He was also dance critic for the Mail on Sunday from 1995 to 2020 and has written on dance-focused subjects for many publications in the UK and the United States, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper's & Queen, the Observer, Daily Telegraph, the Literary Review, Dance Now, and Dance Theatre Journal. He was the opera critic and arts correspondent for the Daily Telegraph from 1996 to 2020, and is the author of a dozen nonfiction books, including Romantic Affinities and City of Light. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and lives in London. Rich Miller has been a storyteller since he was a kid. When he was around ten, he turned the tables on the parents that had instilled a love of books in him: He started reading to his family after dinner every night (his favorites were The Lemonade Trick and The Big Joke Game, by Scott Corbett, but Encyclopedia Brown stories were a big hit as well). Later in life, he found out that people liked having stories acted out for them. He's performed onstage in everything from Shakespeare to Damn Yankees to August: Osage County, and starred in the indie feature Ocatilla Flat. And now he's acting out stories in front of a microphone. Except for when he's dodging Tucson drivers on his bicycle, or finding the next great Happy Hour locale.

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