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Catherine the Great is back on screen: a new season of The Great premieres

The second season of The Great from Hulu has premiered in the United States and Canada and will be premiering in the United Kingdom on 5 December. The popular period drama is a fictional take on Catherine the Great’s early reign.  The Great was written by Tony McNamara, an Australian playwright and author, who also wrote the screenplay for the 2018 film The Favourite. The Favourite featured…
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Book Review: The Race to Save the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport

As the last Emperor of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II’s twenty-three-year reign came to an abrupt end when he abdicated on 15 March 1917. Those tumultuous years of his reign were defined by the Russo-Japanese War that saw the annihilation of the Russian Baltic Fleet, Bloody Sunday and an estimated 3.3 million Russians die during World War I. The relatives of Nicholas’s extended family tree insisted…
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The children of the last Tsar of Russia

Caught forever in a moment of time, they are the tragic family whose terrible end in World War One still appals and fascinates today. The children of the last Tsar of Russia died alongside their parents in Yekaterinburg one hundred years ago this summer. And yet Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei had lived most of their lives in imperial splendour. They had been born to Nicholas II, Tsar…
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The end of the Romanovs

On 17 July 1918, after three centuries in power, the Romanov dynasty came to a tragic end with the brutal execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, Empress Alexandra and their five children. Background Tsar Nicholas II became Emperor of Russia on 1 November 1894 following the death of his father, Alexander III. Nicholas came to the throne at the age of twenty-six, significantly underprepared for…
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