William M. Clarke (1922–2011)

2 1/2 stars, really, but I'm feeling generous. The book relies too much on Edvard Radzinsky for the history of the Romanovs from 1914-17; having read Radzinsky on Stalin, I regard him as suspect (too many personal axes to grind). I bought the book for a particular purpose; to gain more information on the fate of the gold shipments across the Trans-Siberian Railway from 1914 to 1917, and I discovered very little new in that area. The part I am particularly interested in gets a page and a half, and though Japan is mentioned as the repository of some of the missing millions at one point, this is not examined at all.

The book does make some good points in places related to war debts and payments for munitions (which account for many of the legends of the gold scattered around the world) and takes a lot of effort to distinguish between "Tsarist gold" and "the Tsar's gold" (strictly speaking, the term "Tsar" should not be applied as a legal term to any Russian monarch after Peter the Great, but it was in common use).

As a book, this is weird. It is set in Photina - an odd choice for electronic typesetting, and is completely unhyphenated throughout, which means word spacing varies radically throughout a page. Tricky to read. More silly misprints than I would expect, and one howler of an editorial slip: "Rasputin" for "Russian" in one place.… (meer)

Cuando Wilkie Collins murió en 1889, la lectura de su testamento escandalizó a sus contemporáneos. En él dividía su herencia entre sus dos amantes, Caroline Graves y Martha Rudd, a la vez que reconocía como propios a los tres hijos de esta última. Vértice de un singular ménage à trois, personaje central de círculos literarios y artísticos, amigo de Dickens, Coleridge, Wordsworth; su vida es tan apasionante como sus novelas. «La vida secreta de Wilkie Collins» presenta la figura de un hombre que en su obra y en su vida desafió la férrea estructura social y las hipócritas costumbres sexuales de la era victoriana. William M. Clarke , casado con una biznieta de Wilkie Collins, maneja documentos personales y correspondencia del autor de «La dama de blanco», «La piedra lunar» y «Sin nombre» para esbozar este retrato que atiende a su vida privada y personalidad.… (meer)