Anthony Sattin

Monster on the March

The Bloody White Baron

By

Faber & Faber 274pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Don’t be put off by the beginning of James Palmer’s first book. After a creaky start, it gets very much better as the story develops. The same cannot be said of his subject. The bloody baron of the title was Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. It’s not a name many of us will have heard before, although he did have a walk-on part in Peter Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze. But if there is any sense left in the book world, many more of us will know about him through this remarkably accomplished debut. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    • 'A modest and retiring man, Thompson spent his life describing apple varieties and recommending the best – Ribston… ,
    • 'Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palae… ,
    • 'Some scholars attribute Shakespeare’s pre-eminence to four centuries of propaganda and not to the fact that Hamlet… ,
    • RT : We would appreciate any retweets ,
    • We've just stumbled on a gem from the LR archive. The emoluments page from May 1995, in which one reviewer asked to… ,
    Follow Us