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Nicholas and his German-born wife Alexandra generally used English in writing each other. This is the first complete edition of their letters and telegrams, plus English translations of the few telegrams in Russian. We see in these pages the enormous love the couple shared against the backdrop of a bloody war and the approaching end of the Russian empire. Alexandra offers extensive commentary on hospitals and the wounded (she was a volunteer nurse). Nicholas II reports on the military and the war effort. The growing influence of Rasputin is also thoroughly documented in these texts. The reader sees in detail the crises that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the tsarist regime. Important for all students of late Imperial Russia and World War I, and essential for those interested in the Romanovs.

During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war -- the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare. Providing a fresh viewpoint on the history of the Western Front, Boff draws on extensive research in the German archives to offer a history of the First World War from the other side of the barbed wire. He revises conventional explanations of why the Germans lost with an in-depth analysis of the nature of command, and of the institutional development of the British, French, and German armies as modern warfare was born. Using Rupprecht's own diaries and letters, many of them never before published, Haig's Enemy views the Great War through the eyes of one of Germany's leading generals, shedding new light on many of the controversies of the Western Front. The picture which emerges is far removed from the sterile stalemate of myth. Instead, Boff re-draws the Western Front as a highly dynamic battlespace, both physical and intellectual, where three armies struggled not only to out-fight, but also to out-think, their enemy. The consequences of falling behind in the race to adapt would be more terrible than ever imagined.

After the Second World War, war crimes prosecutors charged two of King George VI’s closest German relatives with ‘crimes against humanity’. American soldiers discovered top-secret documents at Marburg Castle that exposed treacherous family double-dealing inside the Royal Family. Two of the King’s brothers had flirted dangerously with the Nazi regime in duplicitous games of secret diplomacy.To avert a potential public relations catastrophe, George VI hid incriminating papers and, with Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt’s help, whitewashed history to protect his family. Three of Philip Mountbatten’s sisters were banned from Westminster Abbey and the wedding of their brother to Princess Elizabeth because their husbands were senior Nazi officers.This dilemma was Queen Victoria’s fatal legacy: she had hoped to secure peace in Europe through a network of royal marriages, but her plan backfired with two world wars.Tea With Hitler is a family saga of duty, courage, wilful blindness and criminality, revealing the tragic fate of a Saxe-Coburg princess murdered as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme and the story of Queen Victoria’s Jewish great-grand-daughter, rescued by her British relatives.

Die mitreißend erzählte Geschichte einer großen Leidenschaft am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs, eingewoben in das Spannungsfeld europäischer MächtepolitikIhre Liebe triumphierte über alle Konventionen des Standes – ihre Ermordung in Sarajewo 1914 wurde zum zündenden Funken, der schließlich ganz Europa in Brand setzte: Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand und Sophie von Hohenberg. Die skandalöse Verbindung des österreichischen Thronfolgers mit der mittellosen Hofdame von niederem Adel löste am Wiener Hof 1900 heftige Wogen der Empörung aus. Kaiser Franz Joseph wie auch der gesamte Hofadel versuchten erbittert, die nicht standesgemäße Ehe des Thronerben zu verhindern. Doch keiner noch so raffiniert eingefädelten Intrige sollte es gelingen, die Liebenden zum Verzicht zu bewegen …