A dark area such as this is rife with suggestion and innuendo, and Greg King has made the most of it. As everybody knows, Rasputin had the ear of the Russian Empress, who was hated as a German at a timed when Russian soldiers were dying by the hundred thousand fighting the Kaiser's armies, and Imperial Russia seemed to be a sinking ship. She was hated particularly by many, or most, of the Czar's immediate Romanov relatives and the crude, almost animalistic yet peasant shrewd "holy man" was widely seen as her evil genius. The actual assassination of Rasputin in December 1916 was a messy affair - he swallowed quantities of poisoned wine, was beaten up and stabbed as he lay on a cellar floor, shot several times and finally thrown into the Neva. That much is common property, but this book goes further by hinting - or more than hinting - that the leader of the assassins, Prince Youssoupov, had been Rasputin's homosexual lover. He was, in fact, bisexual but the squalid, drunken monk seems an unlikely choice for a fastidious aristocrat. Years later, in exile, Youssoupov and his wife Irina brought a suit against MGM for alleged libel in a film, and won huge damages. An unedifying story, reflecting little or no credit on Russia's old ruling class.