Czar Nicholas II, the last Romanov ruler, was a limited, hesitant, easily-led man, who might have been happy as a country squire or petty nobleman, hunting, farming his acres and raising a family. As head of a huge empire going through a socio-political crisis, with autocracy losing its grip everywhere and with powerful, dangerous neighbours posing the threat of European war, he proved to be one of history's tragic failures. His marriage to a minor German princess, Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, was a love match on both sides, made against the advice of his parents who disliked the shy, awkward girl remembered in history as the Empress Alexandra (though Nicholas first had to disentangle himself from his liaison with the dancer Mathilde Kschessinska). It was from Alix's family that the heir to the imperial throne, the Tsarevich Alexis, inherited his haemophilia, which in turn led the half-hysterical empress to rely emotionally on the "holy man" Rasputin for her son's recovery. Rasputin's true character is well known by now, and was fairly plain to most of Russia. but the imperial family's trust in him was widely resented and helped further to undermine confidence in the throne. When Russia blundered into war with the Czar's first cousin, the German Kaiser, the empress's German blood made her suspect and even hated, and her apparent interference in affairs of state, and even in military decisions. was disastrous for both of them and for the empire. The story of Russia's military collapse, and the revolution which abolished Romanov autocracy and ultimately let in the Bolsheviks, is a familiar one but is still well told, while Massie's account of the imprisonment and eventual murder of the entire imperial family is as harrowing as you might expect. This book, first published in 1968, still reads excellently, though in view of recent discoveries a little updating might have been expected.