An unforgettable history of French intelligence agents and courageous British pilots who risked everything in the fight against Hitler!
From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France.
Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house.
But who were these men and women that passed through the Bertram's house?
And what activities did they conduct whilst in France that meant that so many of them never returned?
Edward Wake-Walker charts the experiences of numerous agents, such as Gilbert Renault, Christian Pineau, and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and the networks of operatives that they created that provided top-secret intelligence on German defences and naval bases, U-boats, as well as Hitler,s devastating new weapons, the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs.
An intimate portrait of Stephen Spender's extraordinary life written by Matthew Spender, shifting between memoir and biography, with new insights drawn from personal recollections and his father's copious unpublished archives.
Stephen Spender's life was a vivid prism on the twentieth century. Having met Auden and Isherwood at Oxford, he joined the early vocal critics of Hitler participated in the Spanish Civil War. His efforts there became distracted by the need to save his lover from being shot as a deserter, and by the outbreak of the Second World War he was judged unfit to fight. He served instead as a fireman and later produced propaganda for the war effort - establishing a mysterious connection with the Foreign Office which has generated much speculation until now. Examining the growth of Spender's literary reputation and his later encounters with the CIA, this book sheds new light on his career.
Always susceptible to the allure of young men, Spender remained married to his second wife, Natasha Litvin, but continued to believe in male relationships as an essential creative inspiration. In tension with Natasha's career as a musician after the birth of their two children, a considerable creative tension developed in the household. Stoical in her suffering, Natasha began to agonise over their marriage during her close friendship with Raymond Chandler.
Insightful and revelatory, 'A House in St John's Wood' is the portrait of a marriage, a movement and a father whose complex brilliance continues to be felt widely - and among those closest to him.
In recent years house histories have become the new frontier of popular, participatory history. People, many of whom have already embarked upon that great adventure of genealogical research, and who have encountered their ancestors in the archives and uncovered family secrets, are now turning to the secrets contained within the four walls of their homes and in doing so finding a direct link to earlier generations. And it is ordinary homes, not grand public buildings or the mansions of the rich that have all the best stories.
As with the television series, A House Through Time offers readers not only the tools to explore the histories of their own homes, but also a vividly readable history of the British city, the forces of industry, disease, mass transportation, crime and class. The rises and falls, the shifts in the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities are here, tracing the often surprising journey one single house can take from elegant dwelling in a fashionable district to a tenement for society’s rejects.
Packed with remarkable human stories, it is a phenomenal insight into living history, a history we can see every day on the streets where we live. And it reminds us that it is at home that we are truly ourselves. It is there that the honest face of life can be seen. At home, behind closed doors and drawn curtains, we live out our inner lives and family lives.
Many Christmas traditions and images of 'old fashioned' holidays are based on Victorian celebrations. Going back just a little further, to the beginning of the 19th century, the holiday Jane Austen knew would have looked distinctly odd to modern sensibilities.
How odd? Families rarely decorated Christmas trees. Festivities centered on socializing instead of gift-giving. Festivities focused on adults, with children largely consigned to the nursery. Holiday events, including balls, parties, dinners, and even weddings celebrations, started a week before Advent and extended all the way through to Twelfth Night in January.
Take a step into history with Maria Grace as she explores the traditions, celebrations, games and foods that made up Christmastide in Jane Austen's era. Packed with information and rich with detail from period authors, Maria Grace transports the reader to a longed-for old fashioned Christmas.
Non-fiction
Daniel Defoe (1659 or 1661 - 1731) was an English writer and journalist who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. In 1665, the bubonic plague swept through London, claiming nearly 100,000 victims. In ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’, first published in 1722, Defoe chronicles the progress of the epidemic. His fictional narrator traverses a city with deserted streets and alleyways, where the houses of death have crosses daubed on their doors. He described the panic among the inhabitants of the city as fear, isolation and hysteria reign. Defoe identifies specific neighborhoods, streets, and even houses in which the horrific events took place. Well-researched, the book also provides tables of casualty figures and discusses the reality of various accounts heard by the narrator.
"Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before."
In 1665, London was struck by the bubonic plague, an epidemic that was the last major instance of the bubonic plague in England. This instance of the plague killed 100,000 people over a year and a half, and was transmitted through rats that ran through the city.
A Journal of the Plague Year was presented as an eyewitness account of the epidemic through the eyes of Londoners, though Daniel DeFoe was only a child during the plague. This book was likely based on the journals and writings of his uncle, but is written with factual specificity and authority that place it among other contemporary accounts of the year. Whether it should be called fiction or nonfiction has been widely debated due to its astonishing amount of factual details, but its ultimate fictitious nature of the authorship.
This journal, whether considered fact or fiction, remains relevant centuries later in a world experiencing similar events and casualties. The words within the journal echo the same sentiments as those experiencing the modern pandemic have felt and expressed. Delving into the observations of the past generations gives current readers a sense of shared suffering through the centuries, and may impart retroactive wisdom that is remarkably relevant for current times.
In 1997, Tony Blair won the biggest Labour victory in history to sweep the party to power and end 18 years of Conservative government. He has been one of the most dynamic leaders of modern times; few British prime ministers have shaped the nation's course as profoundly as Blair during his ten years in power, and his achievements and his legacy will be debated for years to come. Now his memoirs reveal in intimate detail this unique political and personal journey, providing an insight into the man, the politician and the statesman, and charting successes, controversies and disappointments with an extraordinary candour. The Journey will prove essential and compulsive reading for anyone who wants to understand the complexities of our global world. As an account of the nature and uses of power, it will also have a readership that extends well beyond politics, to all those who want to understand the challenges of leadership today.
The Instant Top 5 Irish Times Bestseller
From the creator of The Irish History Podcast comes a fascinating look at Irish history through the lens of murder.
In A Lethal Legacy, Fin Dwyer charts 200 years of Irish history, opening up our past as never before, by observing the grand societal changes of our times through the intimate lens of eighteen murders and the lives and communities they altered forever.
From the creator of the critically acclaimed Irish History Podcast comes a ground-breaking exploration of the past, casting its gaze beyond the chambers of power and carnage of battle, and into the lives of the everyday people that lived through those violent centuries. From the desperate retributions of the Land War of the nineteenth century, through the unprecedented tumult of the revolutionary years, to the causes that helped to shape contemporary Ireland, these previously overlooked cases of human tragedy offer a fresh perspective on a history we think we know.
Astonishing, illuminating and compelling, A Lethal Legacy chronicles Ireland’s turbulent past through one of our most enduring fascinations – the act of killing – and in mapping the causes and aftermath of these cases, Dwyer offers us a fresh new understanding of the fires that forged modern Ireland.
Unique, transgressive and as funny as its subject, A Life Discarded has all the suspense of a murder mystery. Written with his characteristic warmth, respect and humour, Masters asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heap.
A Life Discarded is a biographical detective story. In 2001, 148 tattered and mould-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a skip on a building site in Cambridge. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, anonymous diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. Over five years, the award-winning biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of their author, with an astounding final revelation.
A Life Discarded is a true, shocking, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life. The author of the diaries, known only as 'I', is the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Part thrilling detective story, part love story, part social history, A Life Discarded is also an account of two writers' obsessions: of 'I's need to record every second of life and of Masters' pursuit of this mysterious yet universal diarist.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is one of the finest historians of our age. A former special assistant to President Kennedy, he received the National Humanities Medal in 1998. In this first volume of memoirs Schlesinger turns a keen eye on his own remarkable life--from his Midwestern upbringing, through his days at Harvard, to his involvement with World War II. The engrossing story of his life reads like a timeline of the twentieth century. With anecdotes featuring the major politicians, intellectuals, and entertainers of the era, it is easy to see why Dr. Henry Kissinger called this work "one of the definitive histories of the period." Schlesinger's shrewd observations and sharp wit have long helped Americans understand who they are and where they've come from. Now his own story comes to life with a lucid, often humorous narration by Nelson Runger.
The story of the young Teodor unravels on the background of the drama that his family and his country lived in the terrible days of the 1950s in a Stalinist Romania. While the Western countries were engaged in post-war reconstruction, the communist regime, imposed on Romanians by the Soviet Union, was committed to depriving its citizens of the most elementary freedoms and reducing an entire people to starvation.
The regime threatens to eliminate the Flonta family, declaring Pavel, Teodor's father, an 'enemy of the people.' As a consequence, he is arrested, imprisoned and tortured. When the wave of persecution reaches its climax, Pavel is forced to live in hiding. A job Pavel learned in his youth saves him: the Russians, who extract uranium in the Carpathians for their atomic bomb, hire him. There, at the mine, the long arm of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, cannot reach him.
As in communism children were made to suffer for the “sins” the secret police invented for their parents, Teodor goes through a lot of strife while growing up; he is expelled from high school and prevented to undertake studies at the faculty of his choice.
The fall of communism will find Teodor 'at the end of the world', in Tasmania, while his father will be involved in the recovery of the land that the totalitarian regime had confiscated from him decades earlier.
After the untimely death of Prince Albert, the Queen and her nation were plunged into a state of grief so profound that this one event would dramatically alter the shape of the British monarchy. For Britain had not just lost a prince: during his twenty year marriage to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert had increasingly performed the function of King in all but name. The outpouring of grief after Albert's death was so extreme, that its like would not be seen again until the death of Princess Diana one hundred and thirty-six years later.
Drawing on many letters, diaries and memoirs from the Royal Archives and other neglected sources, as well as the newspapers of the day, Helen Rappaport offers a new perspective on this compelling historical psychodrama-the crucial final months of the prince's life and the first long, dark ten years of the Queen's retreat from public view. She draws a portrait of a queen obsessed with her husband and-after his death-with his enduring place in history. Magnificent Obsession also sheds new light on the true nature of the prince's chronic physical condition, overturning for good the one hundred and fifty-year-old myth that he died of typhoid fever.
