Defiant joy

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Edvard Radzinsky

The execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family at the hands of revolutionaries in 1918 is one of the pivotal events of the 20th century, an event that brought the 300-year rule of the House of Romanov to a brutal and tragic end and set the tone for the Stalinist atrocities that would follow. The truth behind these murders remained long buried under more than seventy years of myth, legend, and speculation. Then, in a sensational biography that could not have been written before glasnost, noted Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky unearthed solutions to many of the questions that had remained unanswered since the terrible events in Ekaterinburg on the night of July 16-17, 1918. Mining sources long unavailable -- including firsthand accounts of the slaying -- he creates both a fascinating portrait of the monarch and a minute-by-minute account of his terrifying last days. Included is documentation linking the order of execution directly to Lenin, as well as the suggestion that two family members may have survived the ordeal. Included, too, is the testimony of ordinary Russians who at last felt free to contribute their own recollections, documents, and handed-down secrets. Radzinsky weaves together scores of firsthand accounts into a haunting, epic narrative. The Last Tsar is an important and momentous work, one that will stand as the definitive account of the terrible last days of one of Europe's greatest dynasties. - Adapted from dust jacket.

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Michael De-la-Noy

**From Amazon.com:** In the last eight years of his life - and he died when he was only thirty-three - Denton Welch wrote three novels, umpteen short stories, hundreds of poems, and - between 1942 and 1948, a profoundly personal and moving journal that recorded his swift maturity into a writer of genius. Therein he wrote of his battle with ill-health, his life lived in claustrophobic rooms, and (in frank, erotic terms) his frustrated pursuit of the 'ideal friend.' And yet he encountered some of the foremost writers of his time - Edith Sitwell, Herbert Read, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West - and recorded every aspect of life with a fresh and arresting sensitivity.

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Cornelia Sorabji

"Born into a Parsee family in Nasik in the Bombay Presidency in 1866, Cornelia Sorabji's identity was shaped by three streams of cultural influences - the British, the Indian and the Parsee. Sorabji was India's first woman barrister. This is her autobiography from early childhood to adulthood. Written with a radically feminist perspective, it traces the author's self-development, and depicts the status and lifestyle of orthodox Hindu women, to the amelioration of whose legal and personal status she dedicated herself. This is an immensely readable book, full of wry humour. At the same time, addressing as it does a turbulent period of British rule in India, it deals with issues of colonialism, and questions of identity arising out of a complex racial, religious and cultural hybridity." "This autobiographical piece is a contribution to Indian women's studies, and will be welcomed by general readers as well as scholars of literature."--BOOK JACKET.

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Walter Lowrie

This little book, being simply a biography, may perhaps be more lucid than the other, in which it was sometimes difficult to see the forest for the trees. Having devoted myself for a month last year to the unaccustomed task of writing a mystery story, I may perhaps have learned to make the big events in S.K's life more thrilling than they were. And perhaps after spending the last six years translating the greater part of S.K's works I have learned to know him better than I did at first. At all events, this little book is not merely an abstract or condensation of the bigger one. It has been written afresh from beginning to end, and barely half a page here and there has been copied- except, of course, the quotations from S.K., and they have been carefully revised.