I should add, a propos all these official guests, that some of the most interesting commentators and characters aren't mentioned in the list, because they came in different capacities. The journalist Richard Harding Davis, the translator and radical Aylmer Maude, a young Russian factory worker named Senka Kanatchikov, and a whole bunch of tourists from the US and the UK are among our favourite protagonists, and over the next few days we'll put up some extracts from the start of each chapter of the book, so you can get a flavour of some of the people who appear and of our style of writing. (we are doing this partly because we've had some questions from readers about how it differs from the other book on the coronation, and we think this will help demonstrate the differences. Ours is narrative history).