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Theodora: Portrait in a Byzantine Landscape
By Antony Bridge. 2005
&“First rate popular history/biography, evoking the Byzantine empire at its peak. A remarkable story in an entertaining, informative book.&” —The…
Wall Street Journal This is the biography of a Byzantine courtesan who rose from the gutter to the throne of an empire. It is a romantic and improbable story, and Theodora is an extraordinary woman, indeed. Her background and her many actions were scandalous, but she had qualities of greatness and this book sets the record straight. This account of her life is a pageant in which Emperors and barbarian kings, Popes and Patriarchs, eunuchs and generals, heretics and orthodox opponents, charioteers and ladies of easy virtue, saints and sinners move in a formal and splendid rhythm. This formality was often marred by violence: one of the worst riots in Byzantine history took place when Theodora had been empress for a short time, and during much of her reign there was war in Italy, marked by appalling suffering and barbarity. Toward the end of her life, Constantinople was devastated by Bubonic plague. Yet Theodora triumphed over every adverse circumstance, tough and clever to the end. &“ . . . Bridge&’s book, with its exceptionally vivid and evocative style, brings the period alive.&” —Library Journal &“Puts [Theodora] in her own time and place in the vast panorama of the golden age of an empire which lasted 1,100 years.&” —Boston Herald &“Conveys the passion and the fervor of the sixth century A.D.&” —Los Angeles Herald ExaminerRome in Crisis
By Plutarch. 1965
Bringing together nine biographies from Plutarch's Parallel Lives series, this edition examines the lives of major figures in Roman history,…
from Lucullus (118-57 BC), an aristocratic politician and conqueror of Eastern kingdoms, to Otho (32-69 AD), a reckless young noble who consorted with the tyrannical, debauched emperor Nero before briefly becoming a dignified and gracious emperor himself.Ian Scott-Kilvert's and Christopher Pelling's translations are accompanied by a new introduction, and also includes a separate introduction for each biography, comparative essays of the major figures, suggested further reading, notes and maps.Roger Casement's Diaries: 1910:The Black and the White
By Roger Sawyer. 1997
Born in Ireland in 1864 Roger Casement acted as British Consul in various parts of Africa (1895-1904) and Brazil (1906-11)…
where he denounced atrocities among Congolese and Putumayo rubber workers. knighted in 1911, He returned to Ireland, where as an ardent nationalist he attempted to enlist German help for the cause. He was hanged for high treason in London in 1916. A compulsive diary writer, his so-called 'Black' Diaries were finally released into the public domain in 1994. At the time of his trial, these diaries-detailing his promiscuous homosexual activities in Brazil-were used to condemn him and, subsequently, to poison his reputation. Published here for the first time-as are his more public 'White' Diaries of the same year-they not only offer the reader the opportunity to judge their authenticity-still a matter of heated debate-but they also take us deep into the mind of the bravest, most selfless and practical humanitarian of the Edwardian age.Robert Burns: The Patriot Bard
By Patrick Scott Hogg. 2008
Following the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759-96), Patrick Scott Hogg presents the greatest of Scotland's poets…
within the true context of his times. Exploding the Burns myth, Robert Burns: The Patriot Bard replaces the ram-stam lad of popular cliché with the real, living Burns - a Scottish patriot of the heart, an idealist who wished for 'Freedom and Liberty' for his beloved country, but also a man who was pragmatically a British patriot and risked his life for democratic reform. Here Burns is painted in his native colours as a highly complex, hyper-intelligent writer in both prose and poetry, not the semi-confused, contradictory simpleton of previous biographies. The fascinating legend of Burns as a ladies' man is placed where it should be - as less important than the message of the bard.The real day-to-day Burns was irascible, stubborn-minded, independent, controversial and opinionated. He detested many of his social superiors within the feudal order and attacked them as hypocrites and oppressors of the common people. The voice of Burns, always in the language of the people, and his idealist vision of a better world endeared him as a poet of humanity 'the world o'er'. Drawing from Burns' existing canon of poetry and letters, plus some newly attributed works suppressed for over two centuries, this life story is a roller-coaster narrative that charts the success and untimely death of the greatest songwriter of all time, the real Robert Burns.The Road Taken
By Michael Buerk. 2005
'Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem it lights up…
a biblical famine, now, in the Twentieth Century.'Those words opened Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine for the 6 o'clock news on October 24th 1984. His reports sent shock waves round the world. The Live Aid concert, a direct consequence of Bob Geldof watching that broadcast, was watched by half the planet.Michael Buerk has reported on some of the biggest stories in our lifetime: the Flixborough chemical plant fire, the Birmingham pub bombing, Lockerbie. He was in Buenos Aires at the start of the Falklands War; he reported the death throes of apartheid in South Africa. He was the face of the BBC flagship evening news for many years and has fronted everything from the popular BBC1 series 999 to the erudite Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze. He has won every major award and is universally admired and respected for his intelligent and honest journalism.Here, he also reveals the private Michael Buerk, his bigamist father, his long and happy marriage to Christine and his delight at fatherhood.Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust
By John Bierman. 1995
Swallowed up by the Soviet prison system, the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, saviour of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews…
during the Nazi holocaust, remains a mystery.Recently KGB files have been opened and many Communist crimes have been fully exposed. Yet there is still no evidence, apart from a handwritten note of doubtful authenticity, to support the Kremlin's claim that in 1947 Wallenberg, then thirty-five years old, died of a heart attack in prison. On the other hand there is abundant evidence - none of it conclusive, but much of it highly persuasive - that Wallenberg remained alive in captivity long after 1947, broken in body and spirit, somewhere in the vastness of the former Soviet Union.Righteous Gentile is the first book to tell the full story of Raoul Wallenberg's shining wartime exploits and shameful post-war incarceration.Richard III: A Failed King? (Penguin Monarchs)
By Rosemary Horrox. 2020
No English king has so divided opinion, both during his reign and in the centuries since, more than Richard III.…
He was loathed in his own time for the never-confirmed murder of his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, and died fighting his own subjects on the battlefield. This is the vision of Richard we have inherited from Shakespeare. Equally, he inspired great loyalty in his followers. In this enlightening, even-handed study, Rosemary Horrox builds a complex picture of a king who by any standard failed as a monarch. He was killed after only two years on the throne, without an heir, and brought such a decisive end to the House of York that Henry Tudor was able to seize the throne, despite his extremely tenuous claim. Whether Richard was undone by his own fierce ambitions, or by the legacy of a Yorkist dynasty which was already profoundly dysfunctional, the end result was the same: Richard III destroyed the very dynasty that he had spent his life so passionately defending.Richard II: A Brittle Glory (Penguin Monarchs)
By Laura Ashe. 2016
Richard II (1377-99) came to the throne as a child, following the long, domineering, martial reign of his grandfather Edward…
III. He suffered from the disastrous combination of a most exalted sense of his own power and an inability to impress that power on those closest to the throne. Neither trusted nor feared, Richard battled with a whole series of failures and emergencies before finally succumbing to a coup, imprisonment and murder.Laura Ashe's brilliant account of his reign emphasizes the strange gap between Richard's personal incapacity and the amazing cultural legacy of his reign - from the Wilton Diptych to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales.Richard I: The Crusader King (Penguin Monarchs)
By Thomas Asbridge. 2018
Richard I's reign is both controversial and seemingly contradictory. One of England's most famous medieval monarchs and a potent symbol…
of national identity, he barely spent six months on English soil during a ten-year reign and spoke French as his first language. Contemporaries dubbed him the 'Lionheart', reflecting a carefully cultivated reputation for bravery, prowess and knightly virtue, but this supposed paragon of chivalry butchered close to 3,000 prisoners in cold blood on a single day. And, though revered as Christian Europe's greatest crusader, his grand campaign to the Holy Land failed to recover the city of Jerusalem from Islam.Seeking to reconcile this conflicting evidence, Thomas Asbridge's incisive reappraisal of Richard I's career questions whether the Lionheart really did neglect his kingdom, considers why he devoted himself to the cause of holy war and asks how the memory of his life came to be interwoven with myth. Richard emerges as a formidable warrior-king, possessed of martial genius and a cultured intellect, yet burdened by the legacy of his dysfunctional dynasty and obsessed with the pursuit of honour and renown.Rezso Kasztner: The Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews: A Survivor's Account
By Ladislaus Löb. 2008
Two months after his eleventh birthday, on 9 July 1944, the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp closed behind Ladislaus Löb.…
Five months later, with the Second World War still raging, he crossed the border into Switzerland, cold and hungry, but alive and safe. He was not alone, but part of a group of some 1,670 Jewish men, women and children from Hungary, who had been rescued from the Nazis as a result of a deal made by a man called Rezso Kasztner - himself a Hungarian Jew - with Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust. Twelve years and a miscarriage of justice later Kasztner was murdered by an extremist Jewish gang in his adopted home of Israel. To this day he remains a highly controversial figure, regarded by some as a traitor and by many others as a hero. He was accused of betraying the bulk of the Hungarian Jewry by hand-picking only those who were politically and personally dear to him, or those from whom he could benefit financially, and the judge of his post-war trial concluded that he had 'sold his soul to Satan'.Rezso Kasztner tells his story - and also the story of a child who lived to grow up after the Holocaust thanks to him. A compelling combination of history and memoir, it is also an examination of one individual's unique achievement and a consideration of the profound moral issues raised by his dealings with some of the most evil men ever known.Pitt the Elder: Man of War
By Edward Pearce. 2010
This remarkable book opens at the dawn of the British Empire - with the great sea battle at Quiberon Bay…
where French ships, intended for the 1759 invasion of Britain, are chased, caught and defeated by a fleet commanded by Admiral Sir Edward Hawke. In this momentous victory Britain effectively settled the outcome of the Seven Years' War and established itself as the world's dominant imperial power.At the heart of the conflict with France was William Pitt, the first Earl of Chatham and Britain's future Prime Minister. Weaving together military history and political biography Edward Pearce provides a portrait of the man 'with an eye like a diamond' - a man who had close ties with the slave trade and who preached war and British supremacy on a world stage. Alongside detailed descriptions of battles in Europe and North America we follow Pitt's career as a politician - one that was closely intertwined with General James Wolfe at Quebec; American independence; the slow mind of George III and the quick one of the rake and outsider John Wilkes.Edward Pearce scrutinises the real man at the heart of the historical events and mystique surrounding the legacy of Pitt the Elder, to present a rounded and masterful portrait of arguably the most powerful minister ever to guide Britain's foreign policy and of an age which marked a new epoch in history, when the balance of power in Europe and the world was set for almost two centuries.Personal Impressions
By Isaiah Berlin. 2009
This enthusiastically received collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciation of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world…
- sometimes in both. The names of many of them are familiar - Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, L. B. Namier, J. L. Austin, Maurice Bowra. With the exception of Roosevelt he met them all, and he knew many of them well. For this new edition four new portraits have been added, including recollections of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. The volume ends with a vivid and moving account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956.Pavel's Letters
By Monika Maron. 1999
Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the…
secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, Monika Maron grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents, she questions her mother, whose selective memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' horrifying denouement in Polish exile. Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. In telling her family's powerful and heroic story, she has written a memoir that has the force of a great novel and also stands both as an elaborate metaphor for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.Brought together for the first time in one edition, both of Christabel Bielenberg's bestselling memoirs give an incredibly moving, emotionally…
charged and compelling insight into life in Nazi Germany during The Third Reich and during the aftermath of World War Two. Offering a new perspective, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the wartime era.'This is one of the best WWII books I have ever read' -- ***** Reader review'An excellent book and a must-read for anyone interested in this era' -- ***** Reader review'Absorbing' -- ***** Reader review'Intensely moving' -- ***** Reader review'A wonderful book. I couldn't put it down' -- ***** Reader review***********************************************************************************************The Past is MyselfChristabel Bielenberg, a niece of newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, married a German lawyer in 1934. She lived through the war in Germany, as a German citizen under the horrors of Nazi rule and Allied bombings. The Past is Myself is her story of that experience - and an unforgettable portrait of an evil time.The Road AheadFollowing the extraordinary success of her wartime memoir, The Past is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg received thousands of letters from readers begging her to describe what happened next. In The Road Ahead she continues her story with the outbreak of peace - a time of struggle for reconciliation with, and the rebuilding of, a defeated nation. She also tells of life in her newly adopted country, Ireland, her involvement with the Peace Women of Northern Ireland, and with characteristic modesty and gratitude, looks back on a rich, full life.Anyone interested in the Second World War and life in the 1930s and 1940s will devour these unflinchingly honest and enthralling memoirs, published together in one edition for the first time.A Passion For Trees: The Legacy Of John Evelyn
By Maggie Campbell-Culver. 2006
Given the extent of his influence on 17th-century life, and his lasting impact on the British landscape it is remarkable…
that no book has been written before about John Evelyn. He was a longstanding friend of Samuel Pepys (who wrote of him, ' A most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.'), a founder-member of the Royal Society and a prolific writer and diarist. He was an early advocate of the garden city but his most important work was Sylva: a Discourse of Forest Trees. Sylva was presented to the Royal Society to promote the planting of timber trees 'for the supply of the Navy, the employment and advantage of the poor as well as the ornamenting of the nation.' He was responsible for the first great raft of tree-planting and for a great influx of tree introductions to Britain.Maggie Campbell-Culver's book, like Sylva, has at its core a section detailing the characteristics, history and uses of 33 trees incorporating the advice Evelyn gave and demonstrating its relevance still in the 20th-century. Not only was Evelyn probably the first horticultural writer to show an appreciation of the aesthetic benefits of trees in our landscape, he is shown to be a founder-father of the modern conservation movement.The Pankhursts: The History of One Radical Family
By Martin Pugh. 2001
The suffragettes outraged Victorian society but their personal lives were just as dramatic as their public actions. In this gripping…
and incisive account of the Pankhursts, Martin Pugh reveals the full story behind this unique family: Emmeline, the domineering mother; Christabel, the favourite daughter, who became an Adventist and admirer of Mussolini; Sylvia, the 'scarlet woman'; adn Adela, banished to Australia after a bitter rift.The result is a narrative that reads like a novel, and a brilliant insight into the history of a family that changed the face of British society for ever.Out Of The Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67
By Tony Benn. 1987
1963 saw Labour's emergence from its 'wilderness years' in Opposition, and the election of Harold Wilson following the unexpected death…
of Hugh Gaitskell. In the first Wilson government of 1964 Benn was made Postmaster General and became known as an innovator for his introduction of the Giro and arguing for a radical broadcasting policy. After Labour's landslide victory of 1966 he was appointed to the Cabinet as Minister of Technology, but Labour's honeymoon came to an abrupt end in 1967 with the introduction of devaluation, leading to disilliusionment with the Government.Tony Benn's account on his relations with the industrialists, television and press chiefs, the Palace and the diplomatic world as well as trade unionists, civil servants, and his Cabinet colleagues, reveals the workings of our political and economic systems at the highest level.Out of the Wilderness is a unique political record of the 1960s, told by a man who served in five Labour administrations and who today is one of the most experienced figures both in and out of the House of Commons.'No-one interested in the political influence of the Crown, the intrigues of the civil service or the highly traditionalist character of Harold Wilson can afford to ignore it' The ObserverOpen Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5
By Stella Rimington. 2002
'The story of MI5's transformation - is fascinating. So, too is Rimington's account of her rise in what was very…
definitely a man's world.' Guardian____________________________The eye-opening memoir from the first female Director-General of MI5Stella Rimington worked for MI5 between 1969 and 1996, one of the most turbulent and dramatic periods in global history. Working in all the main fields of the Service's responsibilities - counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism - she became successively Director of all three branches, and finally Director-General of MI5 in 1992.She was the first woman to hold the post and the first Director-General whose name was publicly announced on appointment. In Open Secret, she continues her work of opening up elements of the work of our security services to public scrutiny, revealing the surprising culture of MI5 and shedding light on some of the most fascinating events in 20th century history from the ultimate insider viewpoint.____________________________Stella Rimington is also the author of the novels At Risk and Secret Asset.Oliver Cromwell: England's Protector (Penguin Monarchs)
By David Horspool. 2017
Although he styled himself 'His Highness', adopted the court ritual of his royal predecessors, and lived in the former royal…
palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was not a king - in spite of the best efforts of his supporters to crown him.Yet, as David Horspool shows in this illuminating new portrait of England's Lord Protector, Cromwell, the Puritan son of Cambridgeshire gentry, wielded such influence that it would be a pretence to say that power really lay with the collective. The years of Cromwell's rise to power, shaped by a decade-long civil war, saw a sustained attempt at the collective government of England; the first attempts at a real Union of Britain; the beginnings of empire; a radically new solution to the idea of a national religion; atrocities in Ireland; and the readmission to England of the Jews, a people officially banned for over three and a half centuries. At the end of it, Oliver Cromwell had emerged as the country's sole ruler: to his enemies, and probably to most of his countrymen, his legacy looked as likely to last as that of the Stuart dynasty he had replaced.A Nurse in Action
By Evelyn Prentis. 1978
'We were quickly learning to live with war. We became very proficient at moving the patients who could walk quickly…
to the shelters when the sirens went. We were equally proficient at talking those who couldn't walk into believing that they would be safe where they were. Some believed us, others didn't.'Surprising Matron as well as herself, Evelyn Prentis managed to pass her Finals and become a staff-nurse. Encouraged, she took the brave leap of moving from Nottingham to London - brave not least because war was about to break. Not only did the nurses have to cope with stray bombs and influxes of patients from as far away Dunkirk, but there were also RAF men stationed nearby - which caused considerable entertainment and disappointment, and a good number of marriages ...But despite all the disruption to the hospital routine, Evelyn's warm and compelling account of a nurse in action, shows a nurse's life would always revolve around the comforting discomfort of porridge and rissoles, bandages and bedpans.