The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Antonia Senior’s exceptional new book opens with a bold claim: that an innocent-looking meeting between Comintern spymaster Arnold Deutsch and the 22-year-old Harold ‘Kim’ Philby on a London park bench in June 1934 ‘would change history and help to gift Joseph Stalin...
One always approaches the publication of a new book regarding Rasputin with a certain amount of dread; will it have something new to say, or will it simply peddle the old misconceptions and prejudices where the ‘infamous’ Siberian sorcerer is concerned? Having come at...
Consider a boy. His name is Vasilli Ivanovich Bardeish. He has a weak chin, and jug ears which stick out sideways from his head. In May 1951, he is 22 years old. Vasilli has had the great misfortune to be born in Ukraine in 1929. To two vicious totalitarian dictators...
Antony, thank you so much for joining me. I very much enjoyed the book. I read it over the weekend, absolutely raced through it, as always. My first question, I suppose, is why Rasputin? What took you to that? I appreciate it's very much related to your previous book...
A recent article in The Guardian featured a new book of short stories by Colm Tóibín: “Tóibín’s short stories, particularly in his 2026 collection The News from Dublin, are fundamentally concerned with exploring the internal and external lives of characters living at...
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The mystery. Was Mary Queen of Scots really guilty? Come to think of it, was Anne Boleyn? (because, let’s face it, you don’t make the pathologically egotistical Henry VIII look like a complete and utter...
There is no shortage of books about the Romanovs, and fewer still that manage to resist being drawn too quickly toward their deaths. Mickey Mayhew’s Romanovs Under House Arrest is at its strongest when it slows the story down, devoting space to background, character,...
Mickey Mayhew, your new book covers the final days of the Romanovs, focusing on their imprisonment in the Alexander Palace. What drove you to dig into these few months specifically? I have been fascinated by the Romanovs since picking up a biography on Rasputin in...
Almost as feted a family as the Tudors, the name conjures images of decadent royal Russia, of grizzled Siberian sorcerers and beautiful princesses (or grand duchesses), bejewelled palaces and icy, splendid St Petersburg. Although their reign spanned some several...
