Leopold Phelan grew up in County Mayo, Ireland, and has spent more than two decades studying Russian and Eastern European history, with a particular focus on the revolutionary period and its long aftermath. His research interest in the White emigration - the extraordinary generation of soldiers, writers, and political figures who lived out the Russian catastrophe from café tables in Paris and Berlin - led him to Pyotr Krasnov, a figure whose biography seemed to contain the full moral complexity of the century in a single career. Phelan is the author of several works of narrative military and political history. He lives in the west of Ireland, where, he says, the rain makes sustained archival research feel like a reasonable way to spend an afternoon.