Rasputin

‘Cela me revolte,’ wrote Queen Victoria in her diary in 1894 when her adored granddaughter Alexandra of Hesse announced her engagement to the Tsarevich Nicholas, ‘to feel that she has been taken possession of and carried away by those Russians.’ The sisters all look alike in the photos: uncomfortable dress, priceless jewellery, grimace, hair in bun  The queen was proprietorial about the four surviving daughters of her late daughter Alice, who had died of diphtheria, aged 35, when little Alix was only six. To lose one of those granddaughters to the Russians had been bad enough. Alix’s elder sister, the headstrong Elizabeth, known as Ella, had refused Victoria’s suggestion that

‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if I might be able to deliver 7,000-odd Bibles to the Soviet Union.’ It’s the kind of line you might hear in a bar when you accidentally catch the eye of the resident storyteller — a tale so implausible it could just be true. Where on the scale between fact and fiction Pieter Waterdrinker’s memoir lies is impossible to tell, and beside the point: his engrossing 400-page account of post-Soviet disorder grips you and doesn’t let go. We meet the author — who may be the successful Dutch novelist himself,