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Michael Farquhar doesnt write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwins smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it.Gene Weingarten, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist Scandal! Intrigue! Cossacks! Here the worlds most engaging royal historian chronicles the worlds most fascinating imperial dynasty the Romanovs, whose three-hundred-year reign was remarkable for its shocking violence, spectacular excess, and unimaginable venality. In this incredibly entertaining history, Michael Farquhar collects the best, most captivating true tales of Romanov iniquity. We meet Catherine the Great, with her endless parade of virile young lovers none of them of the equine variety her unhinged son, Paul I, who ordered the bones of one of his mothers paramours dug out of its grave and tossed into a gorge and Grigori Rasputin, the Mad Monk, whose mesmeric domination of the last of the Romanov tsars helped lead to the monarchys undoing.