Overview

Although many books cover the lives of Russia's last royal family in some considerable detail, their time spent under house arrest in their own domestic family home - the Alexander Palace, outside St. Petersburg - is often covered in a few scant pages, or a chapter at most. But when set against the Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar, these few months from February to August 1917 take on tremendous significance and deserve to be studied in some detail, as events spiralled out of control and the Romanovs found themselves virtual prisoners in their own palace. Worse still, with the aforementioned Tsar - Nicholas II - away and ensconced in the vicissitudes of World War One, it was left to his wife Alexandra - favourite granddaughter of Queen Victoria - to commandeer a household increasingly under siege, whilst simultaneously caring for a haemophiliac son and four daughters laid low by life-threatening measles. Alexandra's boast that she was the one who 'wore the trousers' is thus put to the test in the hardiest of scenarios, as she found herself forced both to bolster a flagging palace garrison against the possibility of attack by bloodthirsty insurgents, whilst attempting to hold together a domestic staff increasingly fearful for their own lives in the face of mob retribution. Meanwhile, the German High Command set about releasing a veritable human bacillus - Lenin himself - back toward his native Russia, in a novel attempt to destabilise the Russian war machine further still. Not simply a blow-by-blow account of the daily lives of a monarchy defiled, this book runs in tandem with the Russian Revolution as it surges out from Petrograd and toward the idyllic suburbs that the Romanovs called their home … without Rasputin to rally them, who can save the dynasty now?! AUTHOR: Lifelong Londoner Mickey Mayhew has a PhD concerning the online cult surrounding the 'tragic' queens Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots. He is co-author of three books relating to Jack the Ripper, published by The History Press. His first non-fiction work, The Little Book of Mary Queen of Scots, was also published by The History Press in January 2015; I Love the Tudors, by Pitkin Publishing, arrived in 2016. He has a semi-regular column in the journal of The Whitechapel Society and was previously a freelance film and theatre reviewer for various London lifestyle magazines. Through 2018/2020 he worked as an assistant researcher on several research projects for London South Bank University. This is his third book for Pen and Sword, following the release of House of Tudor and Imprisoning Mary Queen of Scots. 40 b/w illustrations

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9781399041904

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Lifelong Londoner MICKEY MAYHEW has a PhD concerning the online cult surrounding the ‘tragic’ queens Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots. He is co-author of three books relating to Jack the Ripper, published by The History Press. His first non-fiction work, The Little Book of Mary Queen of Scots, was also published by The History Press in January 2015; I Love the Tudors, by Pitkin Publishing, arrived in 2016. He has a semi-regular column in the journal of The Whitechapel Society and is a longstanding committee member. He was previously a freelance film and theatre reviewer for various London lifestyle magazines. From 2018 he has worked as an assistant researcher on several autism-based projects for London South Bank University. This is his fifth book for Pen and Sword, following the release of House of Tudor, Imprisoning Mary Queen of Scots, Rasputin and his Russian Queen, and The Anne Boleyn Bible. His fiction work includes The Barrow Boys of Barking trilogy and the true crime series ‘Dear Boss’.

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