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This is the longed for magic moment. Here I am in a boat, with fellow fisherman, Hal, pitting my newly acquired skills against the canny trout. Cast from two o'clock to ten o'clock; reel in; cast out; musn't trash the water; keep calm. Then something stirs below the loch's inky surface. The thrill of the screaming reel and my first catch: a one-pound brown trout. The rest of the day passes in a daze. I hear that those poor BBC castaways on the island of Taransay have appealed to local fishermen for help after failing to land a single fish in the six months of their battle for survival. Having caught 40 plump trout on nearby [Lewis] in just one week, I offer my modest angling skills to the exiles How to get there [Gabriel Ronay] took the train from Edinburgh to Inverness (#35 return, call 0345 484950 for information) and then a bus to Ullapool (#7.50 return) where he caught the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry to Stornoway (#25 return). Where to stay The Lodge, Soval Estate, Isle of Lewis (four miles south of Stornoway) 01851 830370. Trout fishing including full bed and board (four meals) costs #420 per week per person. Salmon fishing costs #520 per week.

\"Shamefully, their repeated wars did not stem from religious zeal but from filthy lucre, \" explained [Gabriel Ronay]. \"Vlad Dracula extorted taxes from the rich Saxon merchants of Transylvania. Ultimately, Vlad Dracula defeated the Saxon army and put von Frankenstein to a lingering death on a sharp wooden stake.\" Proof of the fight between the real-life Vlad Dracula and a von Frankenstein can be found near Bran Castle in St Mary's Evangelical churchyard in Sibiu where von Frankenstein was buried. Ronay visited the graveyard last year. It also contains the grave of Vlad Dracula's own murdered son. Researcher Teodor GaitaMelnic, has spent 50 years studying the life of Vlad Dracula. He claims he has one document that establishes the von Frankensteins' role in the building of Bran Castle; another records the impaling of von Frankenstein by Vlad Dracula. Ronay said: \"This discovery will cause a lot of upset among some of the millions of people who are dedicated followers of the myths of Dracula and Frankenstein.

Members of the [Josef Stalin] household in the Kremlin were forbidden, on pain or death, to reveal that his wife had not died from appendicitis, as was officially announced, but from a bullet from her own gun. This was kept from the children and from the country at large. Stalin's initial shock soon gave way to fury against the \"traitor woman\". \"It was wrong of her,\" Stalin wrote to his sister- in-law Maria Svanidze, \"that she crippled me (through her deed). But the children soon forgot that she had ever existed.\" There was no second dispatch. Stalin, who always read the party paper from cover to cover, immediately summoned the Politburo. The denouement was predictable. On March 2, 1943, [Aleksandr Kapler] was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour in the gulag. He paid a heavy price for [Svetlana]'s kisses. That evening, Stalin searched his daughter's bedroom and tore up Kapler's love letters and photographs, screaming at her that \"your lover is a British spy\". Then he told Svetlana's sobbing old nanny, who was also in the room: \"There is a terrible war on. Meanwhile, my own daughter is only concerned with f***ing.\" Although Stalin did not have a good word for his son in his earlier notes and letters, [Vaska] eventually replaced Svetlana in their father's affections. The documents show that Stalin indulged his useless son as he made a career out of carousing. Despite endless scandals with officers' wives, street brawls and the killing of a fellow officer in a \"fishing accident\", he was made Commissar for War and, subsequently, commander of an air-force division. At the age of 24, became the youngest general of the Soviet Union.

Eric Christiansen reviews \"The Lost King of England: The East European Adventures of Edward the Exile,\" by Gabriel Ronay.