A psychopathic Buddhist warrior-king hardly sounds plausible in fiction, let alone in modern history. But the story of Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, an Estonian-raised, ethnically German, tsarist officer, who became the last khan of Mongolia amid the chaos of the Russian civil war, has so many bizarre elements that the reader will soon believe almost anything. James Palmer's account of his brutal and ill-starred life is elegant, waspish and evocative. It starts in Estonia (then a Russian colony) where Ungern, as the author calls him, was born into a harsh family of Baltic Germans, the feudal masters of the region. Ungern was an obnoxious child; he tried to strangle a neighbour's pet owl and was expelled from school. His career in the Russian military gained him no distinction, only hideous scars, from duelling. He was almost uniformly detested.
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