Father Alex Smythe is a young parish priest visiting St. Agnes for the first time. St Agnes is a large and wealthy parish. He notices a young lady sitting up front with the junior choir. To him she seems to have no interest in the service or his sermon. Then he discovers that her attention is taken up with the sound of ball and bat of a game of cricket playing just out side the church windows. Even more shocking to his senses is that the girl is the soloist for the morning. When she stood and started to sing, his heart skipped a beat. Who is she, he wanted to know. She was Czarina Hollis the pride and joy of her family. There are more things in store for Father Smythe. Follow him and see how he wins his love and the heart of the town.

Here is “happily ever after”—except when things aren’t happy, and when “ever after” is abruptly terminated by divorce, tragedy . . . or even murder. With her large-hearted understanding of how movies—and audiences—work, leading film historian Jeanine Basinger traces the many ways Hollywood has tussled with the tricky subject of marriage, explicating the relationships of countless marriages from Blondie and Dagwood to the heartrending couple in the Iranian A Separation, from Coach and his wife in Friday Night Lights to Tracy and Hepburn, and even to Laurel and Hardy (a marriage if ever there was one). A treasure trove of insight and sympathy, illustrated with scores of wonderfully telling movie stills, posters, and ads.

This is a book about love, life and death set in Russia, during Czar Nicholas the II’s reign. It commences at the end of the 19th century with his father’s burial and his subsequent inheritance of the Crown – with absolute power. His reign is underpinned by the strong love between him and his wife Alexandra and overshadowed by the presence of Rasputin. But his unwise decisions lead to chaos, including the Khadynka Tragedy, Bloody Sunday, 1905 revolution and the Czar’s abdication. His family is imprisoned, first in Tobolsk and then in Ekaterinburg, and the story concludes with the communists obtaining power and executing the entire royal family. Become entangled in the tales of love, hate, conflict, sex, treachery, and murder between the characters. Dive into a horrifying historical moment from one hundred years ago and experience for yourself life at a crucial turning point in Russia’s bloody history.

An author subject index to selected general interest periodicals of reference value in libraries.