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** spoiler alert ** This book was published over thirty years ago and was clearly aimed at the undiscriminating 'fan' club readers of books about the last tsar. At the time the best thing about the book might have been its pictures, certainly it wasn't the text, but today the photographs, while nice, are neither up-to-date nor particularly interesting. But the worst thing about this book and one that, even if I had read it when first published would have had lead me to give it a negative rating, is the inaccurate almost deceitful labelling on many of the photographs. For example:

On page 25 there is a photo of a part of the former Fabergé showrooms in St. Petersburg showing the name of Fabergé carved in stone - in Latin rather then Cyrillic letters - which means the carving does not date from the pre revolutionary but a more recent period and was probably added to this building, it is impossible to tell if it really is the former Fabergé showrooms, to increase the buildings marketability in the post Soviet period by adding a spurious touch of 'class'.

On page 168 a photo is captioned as 'revolutionary' soldiers packing up the palaces at Tsarskeo Selo after the departure of the Tsar and his family for Tobolsk. There is no evidence that either the Catherine or Alexander Palaces at Tsarskoe Selo were stripped of their furnishings at any stage before they were looted in WWII and plenty that the furnishings were in situ throughout the 1930's - particularly in the case of the Alexander Palace were there is a whole book full of interior shots from the 1920s and 30s showing the family's rooms still as they were when they left. The use of the word 'revolutionary' is also problematic, if revealing. These 'revolutionary' soldiers would have been part of the army of the Provisional Government which was recognized by all the other Allied Governments as the government of Russia. The actual process of large scale removal of furnishings from various former imperial and noble palaces did not get into its stride until late in the 1920s and 1930s under Stalin as part of a search for foreign currency. But the use of this inaccurate caption illustrates a bias to propaganda that should warn any reader of the text that this is a book not to be trusted with elemental facts.

Pages 174-75 has a colour illustration of what appears to be a painting of the Winter Palace during the October revolution. No artist is credited and their is no date for its composition though it was at the time of publication in the Forbes collection but stylistically it does not appear to date from the time of the revolution and certainly does not appear to reflect a reality, but a fantasy of what happened created by someone who was not there and probably hadn't seen any extant images of the extensive looting and destruction that took place. Again it is a biased and propagandistic image.

Also throughout there are images taken from the Illustrated London News but none of them are dated so it is impossible to be sure, and many reasons to doubt, if they are actually images of what they are said to be. This applies as well to various Fabergé picture frames from the Forbes collection which have images of the Tsar and his family but again it is doubtful if these pictures are original to the frames.

As for the text again there is plenty of bias particularly with regards to Anna Anderson the bogus Anastasia who was the subject of one of Mr. Kurth's more unreliable books and who Mr Kurth continued to insist was the 'lost' Anastasia long after the discovery the real Anastasia's remains and those of the other members of the imperial family and their servants. His attempts to muddy the water around the attitude of the Tsar's sister Olga to Ms. Anderson is particularly egregious. Olga makes clear in her memoirs that she never recognized the Anna Anderson as her niece and the willful ignoring of this fact is just typical of how very unreliable and possibly dishonest this work is.

There is no reason why anyone should read, let alone buy this book.

Also the 'spoiler alert' has been added against my wishes - I find it ridiculous in connection with most books and in particular one 30 years old. Is anyone going to be surprised by any of the above?