"Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, a Hachette UK company, in 2017"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 519-547) and index.

Prologue: The coup d'état -- A nest of gentlefolk -- A childhood idyll -- The hanged man -- The police state -- A revolutionary education -- Vladimir Ilyich--attorney at law -- Nadya--a Marxist courtship -- Language, truth and logic -- Foreign parts -- Prison and Siberia -- Lenin is born -- Underground lives -- England, their England -- What is to be done? -- The great schism--Bolsheviks and Mensheviks -- Peaks and troughs -- An autocracy without an autocrat -- Back home -- "Expropriate the expropriators" -- Geneva--"an awful hole" -- Inessa--Lenin in love -- Betrayals -- A love triangle--two into three will go -- Catastrophe--the world at war -- In the wilderness -- The last exile -- Revolution--part one -- The sealed train -- To the Finland station -- The interregnum -- "Peace, land and bread" -- The spoils of war -- A desperate gamble -- The July days -- On the run -- Revolution--part two -- Power--at last -- The man in charge -- The sword and shield -- War and peace -- The one-party state -- The battle for grain -- Regicide -- The assassins' bullets -- The simple life -- Reds and whites -- Funeral in Moscow -- The "Internationale" -- Rebels at sea and on land -- Intimations of mortality -- Revolution--again -- The last battle -- "An explosion of noise" -- Lenin lives.