Night Waves

Isabel Hilton explores the life of Catherine the Great - seen as one of the great female rulers of European and world history. His guest Prof Simon Dixon has written a new biography which tries to bridge the gap between the typically scurrilous popular myths about Catherine and the scholarly research which, since the early 1980s, has portrayed her as a sophisticated her and able ruler of 18th-century Russia. He discusses the notion that it was the judgement of her 19th-century male successors that succeeded in turning Catherine into a misleading, entertaining myth and subject of lewd yarns.