June, 1815. The Coldstream Guards and the third guards are waiting impatiently for orders to move into battle against Napoleon and his French army. Every day seems endless as the troops wait for Wellington's orders. When word is finally received,...
October 1913 and the St Vincent is in Portsmouth harbour, where four midshipmen have come to the end of their first two-year cruise. Called to Captain Ironside’s cabin, they learn their fate. Three are made sublieutenant, the fourth is pushed out...
Exiled in Paris, tiny, one-hundred-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs before all that she believes to be true is forgotten. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the...
Zmyeevich had remained standing and now began to speak in very precise, but very formal and strangely accented French. His voice had a darkness to it that seemed to emit not from his throat but from deep in his torso. Somewhere inside him it was...
St Petersburg, Russia, 1866. Nihilist revolutionaries have taken to the streets and the rule of the Tsar is under threat. In a small flat, Fyodor Dostoyevsky grafts out a novel for an unscrupulous publisher; it isn't the novel he wants to write, but...