This book, the second consecutive one I have read by this author on the Romanovs, tells the stories of those Romanovs and their families and associates who managed to avoid being captured or killed by the Bolsheviks after the revolution. After much negotiation and wrangling, they left from Yalta on HMS Marlborough in April 1919. There were two factions of Romanovs on board - that led by the Dowager Empress Marie Fyodorovna, widow of Tsar Alexander III and mother of the murdered Tsar Nicholas II, and that led by the imposing figure of Grand Duke Nicholas ("Nikolasha"), former C-in-C of the Russian army in the early part of the Great War, when Russia suffered humiliating defeats and losses, which were ironically a major contributory factor in the downfall of the monarchy in March 1917. The book is better written that the author's The Romanovs and Mr Gibbes, which I read immediately prior to this. It is divided into chapters, contains a bibliography (though still no notes), and more and better quality photos. Each chapter corresponds to one day of the approximately two week voyage to Malta, though Day 1 consists largely of background to the characters, and Day 16 mostly recounts their later lives, including those of the officers and ordinary sailors on the ship. These later lives throw up some interesting stories. Empress Marie tried to live in Britain with her sister Alexandra, widow of King Edward VII, but soon moved back to her native Denmark. Understandably she was extremely reluctant to believe that her son Tsar Nicholas and his family (not to mention her other surviving son Michael) could be dead and clung to hope for much of the remaining decade of her life that they may have escaped. Prince Youssoupov, the murderer of Rasputin, was during the Second World War offered the Russian throne by the Nazis, and, after the publication of his memoirs, was even invited back to the country by the Soviet authorities in the 1950s (the sort of quirky gesture one can imagine Khrushchov but no other pre-Gorbachov Soviet leader making). Princess Sofia Zinovieff was called the "Red Princess" when she became a communist after the war, and even acted a tour guide in the Soviet Union to the palaces and other places she had known as a child; ironically she was the only one of the refugees on the ship who lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union, dying in 1994; she was also awarded a medal by the Israeli government for rescuing Jews from the Nazis. An interesting book. ( )

An interesting account of the British evacuation of the last Romanovs from Yalta in 1919. ( )

This is an excellent book about the exit of the Dowager Empress and members of her family from Russia.

Frances Welch provides us with a text that is extremely easy to read and moves along at a fast pace.

Highly enjoyable. ( )