Jet lag be damned, I shall be up before I go to sleep on Monday morning, to appear on Finnish breakfast television. For the thousands of Finnish readers of this blog, that’s MTV3, Huomenta Suomi at 0805 Finnish time. I shall be talking about my new book, Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, the Finnish rights for which were sold before the English edition was even fully delivered.

It’s the true story of an officer in the service of the Tsar’s cavalry in the late-19th/early-20th century, who fought in the Russo-Japanese War before volunteering for a daring undercover mission to spy on the Chinese while crossing Asia on horseback, disguised as a Swedish anthropologist. Later on, he became the president of Finland, and then the subject of a malicious puppet show, but that’s another story.

Just a note for US readers, particularly if you are one of the 500,000 Americans of Finnish ancestry (yes, I was a bit surprised by how many there were, too), or one of the two million American-Swedes. The Mannerheim book won’t be in American shops until the New Year, but if you can’t wait, or want to impress Grandpa Jussi this Christmas, you can order it direct from Amazon UK right now.