Product Description

Nicholas & Alexandra is the internationally famous biography from Pulitzer prize-winner Robert Massie. Massie shows conclusively how the personal curse of the young heir's haemophilia, and the decisive influence it brought Rasputin, became fatally linked with the collapse of Imperial Russia. As an engrossing account of one of the century's most dramatic episodes - and an intimate portrait of two people caught at the centre of a maelstrom - Nicholas & Alexandra is unlikely ever to be surpassed. 'The story of the last Tsar has probably never been so powerfully - and so accurately - told' Guardian

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #178859 in Books
• Published on: 1996-04-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 616 pages

About the Author
Robert K Massie was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929. He studied American History at Yale University and Modern European History at Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar. He lives in Irvington, New York.

Customer Reviews

The Boy Behind the Throne
This is a sensitive narration of the life and death of Russia's last Tsar and his tragic familly. Massie writes clearly and eloquently and succeeds in bringing his characters to life and developing a genuine empathy with them.

Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra emerge as rather sad and pathetic characters, pathologicaly out of touch with reality and hopelessly unqualified for their inherited role. Massie's fascinating thesis is that the Russian revolution may have been brought about by a haemophilia gene passed along from queen Victoria. That is probably an extremely romanticised view of history that would exhonerate Nicholas too much. A more likely truth is that the tragic end of Tsarist Holy Russia was an accident waiting to happen. Here was a flawed system built on fragile people. That fragility more than anything else is what comes across from reading these pages.

Touching and Romantic
Massie's account of the last Tsar and Tsarina's private life will probably never be bettered - yet as a political account it is lacklustre. I came to this book when I was 9 and I loved it, still do, but it shouldn't be read as the definitive political study on the closing years of the Russian monarchy ( I would point you in the direction of Sir Bernard Pares' 'Fall of the Russian Monarchy' or Khrustalev and Steinberg's 'Fall of the Romanovs.') But it is a touching and highly readable book which does infinite justice to the last reigning family in Russia, to date. Despite being a tad uncritical of emigre accounts, Massie has written a true masterpiece of historical nonfiction and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in Russian history.

An excellent biography that kept me gripped until the end.
Robert Massie has written an excellent historical biography, as I knew very little about the events that led up to the Tsar's death. But the book was made up of interesting historical reading without getting boring or monotonous. Through reading this it has led me onto other Russian ruler's biographies and Russian history books.