Helen Rappaport

"They were the Princess Dianas of their day--perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early twentieth century. The four captivating Russian Grand Duchesses--Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia Romanov--were much admired for their happy dispositions, their looks, the clothes they wore and their privileged lifestyle. Over the years, the story of the four Romanov sisters and their tragic end in a basement at Ekaterinburg in 1918...

"Investigating the murder of the Russian Imperial Family, Helen Rappaport embarks on a quest to uncover the many international plots to save them, why they failed, and who was responsible. The murder of the Romanov family in July 1918 horrified the world and its aftershocks still reverberate today. In Putin's autocratic Russia, the Revolution itself is considered a crime and its one hundredth anniversary was largely ignored. In stark contrast, the...

A brilliant account of the political forces swirling through the remote Urals town of Ekaterinburg at the bitter end of the First World War. Challenges the view that the deaths of the Romanovs were a unilateral act by a maverick group of Bolsheviks, and identifies a chain of command that stretches to Moscow-- and to Lenin himself.

Uses Royal Archives sources to examine how the untimely death of Prince Albert plunged both his queen and the nation into a profound state of grief that reshaped the British monarchy.

"An intimate look at the journeys of two men-- a gentleman scientist and a visionary artist-- as they struggled to capture the world around them, and in the process invented modern photography. During the 1830s, in an atmosphere of intense scientific enquiry fostered by the Industrial Revolution, two quite different men-- one in France, one in England-- developed their own dramatically different photographic processes in total ignorance of each other's...