In March 1917, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All Russia, was forced to abdicate and the Romanov dynasty was driven from power after three hundred years. The Last of the Tsars examines Nicholas’s life from the months before his momentous abdication to his death, with his family, in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The story has been told many times, but Service’s deep understanding of the period and his forensic examination of untapped sources, including the Tsar’s diaries and recorded conversations, sheds remarkable new light on Nicholas’s troubled reign. The result is a masterful study of a man who was almost entirely out of his depth, perhaps even wilfully so. It is also a compelling account of the social, economic and political ferment in Russia between the February Revolution which overthrew the Tsar and Lenin’s Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. `Timely and important . . . a fast-paced account of the last sixteen months of the tsar’s life; brief, sharp, but laced with well-judged feeling for the dramas of the time’ Observer `Brilliant, original and compelling’ Evening Standard `Magnificent . . . more detailed and better researched and narrated than any previous account’ Literary Review