The Imperial Tea Party
FAMILY, POLITICS AND BETRAYAL -THE ILL-FATED BRITISH AND RUSSIAN ROYAL ALLIANCE
Frances Welch
The British and Russian royal families met three times before the Romanovs’ tragic end in 1918. The Imperial Tea Party draws back the curtain on those pivotal encounters between these two great dynasties; encounters that had far reaching consequences for 20th century Europe and beyond.
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“A deeply affecting book about the meetings of the Russian and British royal families in the years before the Russian Revolution”
Daily Mail
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“An excellent history … Welch has a gossip columnist s nose for a story. Intrigue aplenty. She strikes the balance between parties and pathos.”
The Times
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“In this funny, touching and ultimately tragic book, Frances Welch brilliantly exposes how the British family courted and then abandoned their royal cousins in the runup to World War I.”
Mail on Sunday
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“In juxtaposing the trivial with the monumental and the intensely personal with the inconceivably remote, this book shines a light into an extraordinary, intermittently hilarious and ultimately tragic corner of 20th-century diplomacy.”
Country Life
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“This is a delightful witty and entertaining book… Frances Welch captures perfectly the pathos and banality of the Russian Imperial Family, locked in a Faberge-encrusted cage of domesticity and baby language.”
Times Literary Supplement
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“Reading her books is rather like reading the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett: accounts of rarefied, claustrophobic worlds, featuring strange, intense relationships, and with a strong tendency to wander conversationally from subject to subject, place to place and person to person.”
The Spectator
