Ian Sansom

Entertaining cousin Nicky

First it was McMafia; then the Skripals and the World Cup. Now Frances Welsh wades again into the Romanov story and their awkward family ties to the Windsors

First it was McMafia. After which it was the Skripals. Then the World Cup. Come the end of the year even Buckingham Palace is getting in on the act with a new exhibition, Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs (‘Through war, alliance and dynastic marriage the relationships between Britain and Russia and their royal families are explored from Peter the Great’s visit to London in 1698 through to Nicholas II’).This is the year we were all reminded of our close relationship with the Russians. Some of us, of course, are more closely related than others. Lest we forget: Queen Victoria was the grandmother of Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress of Russia, and of King George V, the present Queen’s grand-father and founder of the House of Windsor; Prince Philip is the grandnephew of Alexandra and great-great-grandson of Nicholas I. Still with me? Basically, it means that William and Harry have more than a touch of the Romanovs about them: this surely explains Harry’s beard. Certainly nothing else does. Frances Welch has long been explaining the Russians to the Brits. She is the author of, among others, Rasputin: A Short Life (2014), The Russian Court at Sea (2011) and The Romanovs & Mr Gibbes (2004), which tells the true story of how a bluff Yorkshireman ended up as tutor to the Russian royal family and which is one of those very special but sadly now out-of-print books that one occasionally picks up in second-hand bookshops and presses on friends and acquaintances, in the vague hope that it might one day arrive in the right hands and be made into a blockbuster movie, perhaps directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Tom Hardy as Sydney Gibbes. (Gibbes was a violent, weird outsider who became an Orthodox monk. I mean, come on! If you know Tom Hardy, tell Tom Hardy: this is a role made for Tom Hardy.

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