THE BLOODY WHITE BARON

James Palmer (Faber, £18.99)

To say he was eccentric would have been very kind. The German aristocrat Baron Ungern von Sternberg was a cruel madman who set out to slaughter the Bosheviks and Jews after the First World War.

He had a passion for horses - dreaming of leading his ragtag cavalry to the gates of Moscow - and for wolves, whom he was said to have kept locked up in his attic, waiting to feast upon prisoners and mutinous soldiers.

The baron was certainly a legend in his lifetime. Many Mongolians, whom he had conquered, thought he possessed the spirit of Genghis Khan.

More likely, he resembled Conrad's Kurtz.

Palmer has brought him alive again after 80 years, and in doing so has sought to probe the psyche behind one of the world's worst despots.

Thus we have a hugely interesting vista of an important part of Russian history when the White Army challenged the power of Lenin.

The driving force was his belief in a code of vengeance paradoxically deriving from Buddhism. So both as mystic and warrior, Ungern became the wild man of the landscape "lauded as a hero, feared as a demon and, briefly, worshipped as a god".

His aim was an empire stretching from China to the Urals.

This might have been hailed in a time of extreme political upheaval, but his means to achieve it was through savagery and atrocity.

Palmer's research into this long-lost warlord is quite exceptional. Colin Gardiner