Volume 39, Number 21 · December 17, 1992
The Golden Age
By Tatyana Tolstaya, Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II
by Edvard Radzinsky, translated by Marian Schwartz
Doubleday, 462 pp., $25.00
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Family Albums
by Prince Michael of Greece
Tauris Parke Books, 240 pp., $49.50
At a dinner after an art exhibition opening in the mid-1970s, I was seated next to an elderly woman, and told in a whisper that she was ninety but had all her wits about her. We started talking and the conversation turned to Nicholas II. The old woman, as it turned out, had once been something like a lady-in-waiting at the court. She sighed: 'Everyone always says he was such a tyrant… But why, really? They always served such fresh cream at table.'
Review, 4619 words
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