Giles Milton
Dancing with the Tsars
You probably won’t have heard of Frederick Bruce Thomas. He doesn’t feature in history books and failed to make the cut for the American National Biography. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry but that may be about to change. Vladimir Alexandrov’s new book, The Black Russian, tells Frederick Thomas’s life story, and – hold on to your eyelids – it’s quite a tale. Indeed it’s so colourful and improbable that it reads more like a novel than a work of historical biography.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This rude spectral activity was a far cry from the moaning and chain-clanking traditionally associated with hauntings. It had a distinctly modern flavour.'
@LucyLethbridge on a real life haunting.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-woolworths-poltergeist
'I inadvertently saw "Saturn Devouring His Son" in my early teens and it was a very unsettling thing to come across.'
@robinsimonbaj on Goya.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-painted-it-black
'The narrative moves fluently between the raffish ... life he was living there, his main love affair and friendships – most of them kept up for a lifetime – and his journalism.'
Jeremy Treglown weighs up Hermione Lee's biography of Tom Stoppard.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-long-road-to-leopoldstadt