News about Grigori Rasputin

From blood-spattered whodunnits to furtive romances or theft on the grandest scale, these are all true stories with three things in common. They all involve royalty. They all involve great scandal. And they all continue to throw up intriguing, unanswered questions. And, from today, everyone is very welcome to throw in an opinion of their own, as the Daily Mail launches the new podcast series: Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things.

It is known as the 'royal disease', and for very good reason. The bleeding disorder haemophilia B was unwittingly introduced into the royal families of Europe by Queen Victoria, before nine of her descendants died from the disease. They included her youngest son Prince Leopold, who died a week short of his 31st birthday. But, had Leopold been alive today, there would have been fresh hope thanks to recent news that, after successful trials, a gene therapy once billed as the 'world's most expensive drug' is now being made available to treat the condition. The most significant of the royal haemophiliac deaths was that of Alexei (right, with his father), the much longed-for male heir of Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his wife Alexandra ('Alix'), who was Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter. She increasingly sought solace in the mysticism of the Russian orthodox church and would eventually fall under the spell of Grigori Rasputin, the lank-haired, evil-smelling peasant with magnetic eyes. As well as relieving the Empress's emotional suffering, he had a calming influence on Alexei and was believed to help ease the boy's symptoms. In Spain, Queen Victoria Eugenie - granddaughter of Queen Victoria and great-grandmother of King Felipe VI - gave birth to two haemophiliac sons. The first, Alfonso (inset), Prince of Asturias, was heir apparent to the throne of Spain. He died aged 31.

From a thrashestic political thriller about Russian espionage to stories of life in the Jim Crow period of the American South, check out our experts' picks of the best books to read this weekend. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (left), Diane Oliver's Neighbours (centre), and Ian Russell-Hsieh's I'm New Here (right).

The Empress, Rasputin And The Empress opened at the Astor Theatre in New York. It starred three leading Hollywood celebrities, including Ethel, John and Lionel Barrymore, who ostensibly tell the tale of Rasputin's assassination. Critics gave the film a mixed reception, though a New York Times writer made a remark about Prince Chegodieff's "war against Prince Chegodieff, as Prince Youssoupoff is known here, and the Mad Monk." He believed that the character of Chegodief was supposed to be the real-life Prince Felix Youssoupoff, and that everybody knew that Felix was married to the tsar's beautiful niece Princess Irina. Irina had never met Rasputin and protested the film's content and defamation of her character. Lawyers immediately spotted reasons for libel, and, as the film was on view in London, the Youssoupoffs took action.

Charting the development of pop music from the 1950s to the present, with a fascinating event for every day of the year, a diverting new book reveals the strange twists and quirks of musical history…

Wagner, a Russian private military contractor owned by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin (top-left and top-right), has a reputation over the years for its merciless attitude on the battlefield. Prigozhin has recruited prisoners to fight alongside his more seasoned troops, using the convicts as a canon fodder to march across Ukraine's blood-soaked fields. However, after Wagner and Moscow's attempt to seize Soledar, a small town near Bakhmut's main goal, a Russian journalist has reported that only one-fifth of the Russian prisoners recruited by the Russians remained after the ferocious fighting. Mercenaries who fail or abandon the PMC face serious consequences. A high-ranking Wagner fighter was arrested in Norway on Monday after fleeing across the border in search of asylum, fearing for his life, according to a newspaper. And in a harrowing video that circulated online for doing so, Russian Andrey Medvedev said he was in the same unit as Yevgeny Nuzhin, who switched sides in the Ukraine war, and was executed with a sledgehammer. Now, a new account that seems to be from November has surfaced, indicating that a Wagner deserter had his testicles cut off while attempting to surrender to Kyiv's forces. Prigozhin, Wagner's chief (centre) is seen in one of the salt mines in Soledar, Ukraine, where his troops had taken the town without assistance from Russian forces, angering Putin.