The effect of Catherine’s loveless childhood, loveless marriage and the instant removal of her babies was that she spent her life wanting to love and be loved. Legend has it that she enjoyed hundreds of lovers, including her own horse, but Massie tells us – repeatedly – that the number was in fact 12, that only four were significant, and the most significant of these was Gregory Potemkin, whom Catherine described as “one of the greatest, most bizarre, and most entertaining eccentrics of the iron age”. The only mention of horses is an account she gives in her memoirs of lying in bed aged 13 with a pillow between her legs which, imagining she was astride a stallion, she would ride “until I was quite worn out”.