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Jane Ridley

The prequel to The Crown: the first truly candid portrait of George V and Mary, the Queen's grandparents and creators of the modern monarchy 
 
Shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Historical Biography prize and the History Reclaimed Book of the Year prize 
 
The lasting reputation of George V is for dullness. However throughout his reign, the monarch navigated a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of thirteen European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II and he facilitated the first Labour government. 
 
How this supposedly limited man steered the Crown through so many perils is a gripping tale. With unprecedented access to the Royal archives, Jane Ridley has been able to reassess the many myths associated with this dramatic period for the first time. 
 
'Wonderful... Never a dull paragraph' Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Times 
 
'Magnificent... An evocative and touching portrait of a surprisingly impressive man' Philip Hensher, Spectator 
 
'A big, beautiful beast of a book. Fair, thorough and unexpectedly funny' Lucy Worsley

George V

Never a Dull Moment

Laura Cumming

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD** 
 
Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story. 
 
'A modern masterpiece' Guardian 
 
Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again. 
 
Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old. 
 
'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times 
 
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 
Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

On Chapel Sands

My mother and other missing persons

Tracy Borman

Henrietta Howard, later Countess of Suffolk, was the long-term mistress and confidante of King George II. She was also, as Tracy Borman's wonderfully readable biography reveals, a dedicated patron of the arts; a lively and talented intellectual in her own right; a victim of adultery; a passionate advocate for the rights of women long before the dawn of feminism. Above all she was a woman of reason in an Age of Reason. The mark that this enigmatic and largely neglected royal mistress left on the society and culture of early Georgian England was to resonate well beyond the confines of the court, and can still be felt today.

King's Mistress, Queen's Servant

The Life and Times of Henrietta Howard

Lanre Bakare

**AN OBSERVER, GQ, ESQUIRE AND INEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
This is the lost story of a hidden Britain. A Black Britain. One that existed outside London and rewrites our idea of British culture. 
 
Rocked by economic turmoil, the rise of the National Front, heavy-handed anti-immigration policies and widespread civil unrest, Thatcher’s Britain was in tumult. And yet, all around this nation, Black creativity, community and resistance flourished like never before. 
 
From Bradford’s towering mills and Northern Soul’s euphoric dance floors to the multicultural docks of Cardiff Bay and rolling hills of rural Britain, from Rastafarians and rugby stars to artists and activists, Lanre Bakare unearths the overlooked places and people who made Britain what it is today. Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There is a dazzling, profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain and a shared legacy which belongs to us all.

We Were There

How Black culture and community shaped modern Britain

How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain

Jean Stein

George Plimpton

A brilliant and unique biography of Andy Warhol's tragic muse, the 60s icon Edie Sedgwick 
 
‘Exceptionally seductive… You can’t put it down’ LA Times 
 
Outrageous, vulnerable and strikingly beautiful - in the 1960s Edie Sedgwick became both an emblem of, and a memorial to, the doomed world spawned by Andy Warhol. 
 
Born into a wealthy New England Edie’s childhood was dominated by a brutal but glamourous father. Fleeing to New York, she became an instant celebrity, known to everyone in the literary, artistic and fashionable worlds. She was Warhol's twin soul, his creature, the superstar of his films and, finally, the victim of a life which he created for her. 
 
Jean Stein’s classic biography of Edie is an American fable on an epic scale - the story of a short, crowded and vivid life which is also the story of a decade like no other. 
 
‘Edie Sedgwick was the spirit of the sixties, and these pages capture her power to dazzle us… This is the book of the Sixties we have been waiting for’ Norman Mailer

Edie

American Girl

An American Biography

Adrian Fort

In 1919, Nancy Astor became the first woman to take a seat in parliament. 
 
She was not what had been expected. Far from a virago who had suffered for the cause of female suffrage, she was already near the centre of the ruling society that had for so long resisted the political upheavals of the early twentieth century, having married into the family of one of the richest men in the world. She was not even British. She would prove to be a trailblazer and beacon for the generations of women who would follow her into Parliament. 
 
This new biography charts Nancy Astor's incredible story, from penury in the American South, to a lifestyle of the most immense riches, from the luxury of Edwardian England, through the 'Jazz Age', and on towards the Second World War: a world of great country estates, lavish town houses and the most sumptuous entertainments, peopled by the most famous and powerful names of the age. But hers was not only the life of power, glamour and easy charm: it was also defined by principles and bravery, by war and sacrifice, by love and bitter disputes. 
 
With glorious, page-turning brio, Adrian Fort has brought to life this restless, controversial American dynamo, an unforgettable woman who left a deep and lasting imprint on the political life of our nation.

Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor

September 1613. 
 
In Belvoir Castle, the heir of one of England’s great noble families falls suddenly and dangerously ill. His body is ‘tormented’ with violent convulsions. Within a few short weeks he will suffer an excruciating death. Soon the whole family will be stricken with the same terrifying symptoms. The second son, the last male of the line, will not survive. 
 
It is said witches are to blame. And so the Earl of Rutland’s sons will not be the last to die. 
 
Witches traces the dramatic events which unfolded at one of England’s oldest and most spectacular castles four hundred years ago. The case is among those which constitute the European witch craze of the 15th-18th centuries, when suspected witches were burned, hanged, or tortured by the thousand. Like those other cases, it is a tale of superstition, the darkest limits of the human imagination and, ultimately, injustice – a reminder of how paranoia and hysteria can create an environment in which nonconformism spells death. But as Tracy Borman reveals here, it is not quite typical. The most powerful and Machiavellian figure of the Jacobean court had a vested interest in events at Belvoir.He would mastermind a conspiracy that has remained hidden for centuries.

Witches

James I and the English Witch Hunts

A Tale of Sorcery, Scandal and Seduction

Yanis Varoufakis

Eleni put an arm around him and said: ‘Come, come, life is ahead of us. Raise your soul now. We have much to do.’ 
 
When Yanis Varoufakis was eight years old, his uncle made him a model airplane out of matchsticks and cigarette papers; all he could find in his cell. Yet, to his dismay, his mother Eleni broke open the fragile gift, revealing a hidden message: instructions for fellow dissidents ahead of their forthcoming court martial. It was 1969 and Uncle Panayis was a political prisoner, captured and tortured for resisting the military dictatorship. 
 
Dramatic in scope and deep in feeling, Raise Your Soul is an intimate portrait of three generations caught up in the whirlwind of history. It is also a remarkable narrative spanning one hundred years, beginning in post-colonial Egypt in the 1920s, and then tracing Greece’s tumultuous century through Nazi occupation, communist resistance, civil war, Cold War fracture, fascist dictatorship, socialist revival and present-day economic crisis. 
 
At its heart are the women whose resilience, defiance and courage inspired the visionary economist most: Eleni, Anna, Trisevgeni, Georgia and Danaë. Through their lives, Varoufakis not only lays bare his own political soul, but confronts the dark forces of authoritarianism that still haunt Europe and beyond, reigniting hope in all of us that we can rise once more.

Raise Your Soul

A Personal History of Resistance

Caroline Moorehead

Lucie de la Tour du Pin was the Pepys of her generation. She witnessed, participated in, and wrote diaries detailing one of the most tumultuous periods of history. From life in the Court of Versailles, through the French Revolution to Napoleon's rule, Lucie survived extraordinary times with great spirit. She recorded people, politics and intrigue, alongside the intriguing minutia of everyday life: food, work, illness, children, manners and clothes. 
 
Caroline Moorehead's richly novelistic biography sets Lucy and her dairies in their wider context, illuminating a remarkable period of history. 
 
Dancing to the Precipice was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2009.

Dancing to the Precipice

Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution

Roland Philipps

'The wartime spy career of Mathilde Carré - aka "the Cat" and "Agent Victoire" - is so extraordinary it almost defies belief' The Times 
 
An exhilarating true story of espionage, resistance, and one of WW2's most charismatic double-agents. 
 
Occupied Paris, 1940. A woman in a red hat and a black fur coat hurries down a side-street. She is Mathilde Carré, codenamed 'the Cat', later known as Agent Victoire - charismatic, daring and a spy. 
 
These are the darkest days for France, yet Mathilde is driven by a sense of destiny that she will be her nation's saviour. Soon, she is at the centre of the first great Allied intelligence network of the Second World War. 
 
But as Roland Philipps shows in this extraordinary account of her life, when the Germans close in, Mathilde makes a desperate and dangerous compromise. Nobody - not her German handler, nor the Resistance and the British - can be certain where her allegiances now lie... 
 
'A truly astonishing story, meticulously and brilliantly told' Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline 
 
'Gripping... Enough plot twists and moral ambiguity to satisfy any spy novelist' Spectator

Victoire

A True Story of Espionage and Resistance in WW2

A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
 
Mussolini was not only ruthless: he was subtle and manipulative. Black-shirted thugs did his dirty work for him: arson, murder, destruction of homes and offices, bribes and intimidation. His opponents – including editors, union representatives, lawyers and judges – were beaten into submission. But the tide turned in 1924 when his assassins went too far, horror spread across Italy, and antifascist resistance was born. Among those whose disgust hardened into bold and uncompromising resistance was a family from Florence: Amelia, Carlo and Nello Rosselli. Caroline Moorehead draws readers into the lives of this remarkable family – their loves, their loyalties, their laughter and their ultimate sacrifice.

A Bold and Dangerous Family

One Family’s Fight Against Italian Fascism

The Rossellis and the Fight Against Mussolini

Robert K Massie

A gripping chronicle of the personal and political rivalries from the birth of Queen Victoria to the unification of Germany during the decades leading up to WW1 from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert K. Massie 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. How did it all begin? 
 
With the biographer's rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittering figures: the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow; Britain's greatest twentieth-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionised the British Navy and brought forth the battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstanding and tensions, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought is history at its most riveting. 
 
‘History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking’ Dan Snow, Daily Express

Dreadnought

Britain,Germany and the Coming of the Great War

John Gross

John Gross was the son of a Jewish doctor who practised in Mile End at the time of WW2. His parents were the children of immigrants, steeped in the language and traditions of a European past, yet outside the home he grew up in a very English world of schools and books. Looking back on his childhood he reflects on this double inheritance. The richness of Yiddish words, the rituals of religion set against the daily life of the East End, where gangsters were heroes and patients turned up on the doorstep at all hours. Yet in the background lies the shadow of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. A Double Thread is a marvellously vivid picture of a lost London and a vanished culture but it is also the story of an imaginative boy discovering his own path, through books andfilms and school - away from the East End into the new freedoms of a literary life.

A Double Thread

Barbie Latza Nadeau

The killing took place outside a busy coffee bar in Naples in broad daylight. 
 
Pupetta was eighteen years old and six months pregnant when she pulled the gun from her bag. 
 
The victim? 
 
A man known as Big Tony who had ordered the hit on her husband just months earlier... 
 
In this unputdownable exposé of women in the Mafia, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau tells the stories of the women who have risen to prominence in the Italian mob, beginning with the first documented female boss, the infamous Pupetta Maresca. Through personal interviews and groundbreaking research, Nadeau gives us a jaw-dropping 360-degree view of the dark underbelly of Italian society, taking us deeper into the Mafia and its complex realities than ever before. 
 
'Takes the reader into the little-known role of the women that underpin Italy's most ruthless mob families' Sara Gay Forden, author of House of Gucci 
 
'An unflinching portrait of one the original divas of organised crime' Clare Longrigg, author of Mafia Women 
 
'A must for true-crime fans' Publishers Weekly

The Godmother

Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women

Adrian Tinniswood

From the bestselling author of The Long Weekend: a wild, sad and sometimes hilarious tour of the English country house after the Second World War, when Swinging London collided with aristocratic values. 
 
'Preposterously entertaining' Observer 
'Brilliant' Daily Telegraph 
'Rollicking' Sunday Times 
 
As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. 
 
Yet - perhaps surprisingly - many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, Noble Ambitions takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power. 
 
* A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year * 
* Longlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History *

Noble Ambitions

The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House

Simon Morrison

As heard on Radio 4 Book of the Week 
 
Lina Prokofiev was alone in her Moscow apartment one night when the telephone rang. The caller insisted that she come downstairs to collect a parcel, but when she reached the courtyard she was arrested for treason. 
 
First enraptured by the young pianist and rising star, Serge Prokofiev, during a courtship in Brooklyn, then abandoned by him in Moscow, Lina survived one of the darkest periods in Soviet history – enduring eight years in the Gulag after she received that fateful telephone call. 
 
Unfolding with the intrigue of a spy novel, The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev traces the largely untold story of a remarkable woman who gave up her career, her country and her freedom for the brilliant man she married.

The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev

The Story of Lina and Serge Prokofiev

Rich Cohen

When they were not yet twenty years old three young Jews left their families in Western Poland and came to the Lithuanian ghetto of Vilna. Abba, leader of the young people in the ghetto and Rushka and Vitka were his deputies. Together they organised the first underground movement in Europe, mapping the sewers and using the tunnels beneath the city to smuggle food and weapons into and out of the ghetto. In 1943 they escaped the ghetto and led their band of resistance fighters deep into the forests of Poland, where they lived for the remainder of the war. From here, they bombed the occupied city they loved. When the war was over Abba, Vitka and Rushka went to Israel, but they did not forget what they had learned in Vilna and in the forest.

The Avengers

Catherine Fletcher

'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire, stitching together our histories and continuing to inspire our imaginations. 
 
Over the two thousand years since they were first built, the roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. Catherine Fletcher shows how the roads – as channels of trade and travel, routes of conquest and creativity – forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond. 
 
The Roads to Rome is a magnificent journey into a past that remains intimately connected to our present. Travelling from Scotland to Cádiz, from Istanbul to Rome, we meander and march through a series of nations and empires that have risen and fallen. Along the way, we encounter spies and bandits, scheming innkeepers, a Byzantine noblewoman on the run, young aristocrats on their Grand Tour, a conquering Napoleon, Keats and the Shelleys, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and even Mussolini on his motorbike. 
 
Reflecting on his own walk on the Appian Way, Charles Dickens observed that here is ‘a history in every stone that strews the ground’. Based on outstanding original research, and brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of history through one of the greatest imperial networks ever built.

The Roads To Rome

A Journey Into Europe’s Past

A History

David Starkey

Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived 
 
CATHERINE OF ARAGON: the pious Spanish Catholic who suffered years of miscarriages and failed to produce a male heir... 
ANNE BOLEYN: the pretty, clever, French-educated Protestant whose marriage to Henry changed England forever... 
JANE SEYMOUR: the demure and submissive contrast to Anne Boleyn's radical and vampish style... 
ANNE OF CLEVES: 'the mare of Flanders' whose short marriage to the overweight Henry followed a farcical 'beauty contest'... 
CATHERINE HOWARD: the flirtatious teenager whose adulteries made a fool of the ageing king... CATHERINE PARR: the shrewd, religiously radical bluestocking who outlived him... 
 
In this dazzling study, David Starkey gives us a richly textured picture of daily life at the Tudor Court from the woman's point of view. Above all, he establishes the interaction of the private and the public, and demonstrates how the Queens of Henry VIII were central in determining political policy.

Six Wives

The Queens of Henry VIII

Roger Moorhouse

Berlin was the nerve-centre of Hitler's Germany - the backdrop for the most lavish ceremonies, it was also the venue for Albert Speer's plans to forge a new 'world metropolis' and the scene of the final climactic bid to defeat Nazism. Yet while our understanding of the Holocaust is well developed, we know little about everyday life in Nazi Germany. 
 
In this vivid and important study Roger Moorhouse portrays the German experience of the Second World War, not through an examination of grand politics, but from the viewpoint of the capital's streets and homes.He gives a flavour of life in the capital, raises issues of consent and dissent, morality and authority and, above all, charts the violent humbling of a once-proud metropolis. 
 
Shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman History Prize.

Berlin at War

Life and Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939-45

Stephen Greenblatt

A riveting, exemplary tale of the great cultural &quot;swerve&quot; known as the Renaissance. 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2012 
 
Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and it changed the course of history. 
 
He found a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas &ndash; that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thoughts of Montaigne, Darwin, and Einstein. 
 
An innovative work of history by one of the world&rsquo;s most celebrated scholars and a thrilling story of discovery, The Swerve details how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made possible the world as we know it. 
 
&lsquo;Superbly readable... An exciting story, and Greenblatt tells it with his customary clarity and verve&rsquo; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph

The Swerve

How the Renaissance Began

Alison Weir

The war between the houses of Lancaster and York for the throne of England was characterised by treachery, deceit and - at St Albans, Blore Hill and Towton, - some of the bloodiest and most dramatic battles on England's soil. Between 1455 and 1487 the royal coffers were bankrupted and the conflict resulted in the downfall of the houses of Lancaster and York and the emergence of the illustrious Tudor dynasty. 
 
Alison Weir's lucid and gripping account focuses on the human side of history, on the people and personalities involved in the conflict. At the centre of the book stands Henry VI, the pious king whose mental instability led to political chaos, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York and Henry's rival, and most important of all, Margaret of Anjou, Henry's wife who took up her arms in her husband's cause and battled for many years in a violent man's world.

Lancaster And York

The Wars of the Roses

Carmen Callil

Bad Faith tells the story of one of history's most despicable villains and conmen - Louis Darquier, Nazi collaborator and 'Commissioner for Jewish Affairs', who dissembled his way to power in the Vichy government and was responsible for sending thousands of children to the gas chambers. After the war he left France, never to be brought to justice. 
 
Early on in his career Louis married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of fantasy and deception, and together they had a child, Anne whom they abandoned in England. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. 
 
In Carmen Callil's masterful, elegiac and sometimes darkly comic account, Darquier's rise during the years leading up to the Second World War mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism. Epic, haunting, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study in powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance. 
 
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Bad Faith

A History of Family and Fatherland

Helga Schneider

Abandoned by her mother, who left to pursue a career as a camp guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, loathed by her step-mother, cooped up in a cellar, starved, parched, lonely amidst the fetid crush of her neighbours, Helga Schneider endured the horrors of wartime Berlin. The Bonfire of Berlin is a searing account of her survival. The grinding misery of hunger, combined with the terror of air-raids, the absence of fresh water and the constant threat of death and disease served not to unite the tenants and neighbours of her apartment block but rather to intensify the minor irritations of communal life into flashpoints of rage and violence. And with Russian victory the survivors could not look forward a return to peacetime but rather to pillage and rape. It was only gradually that Schneider's life returned to some kind of normality, as her beloved father returned from the front, carrying his own scars of the war. This shocking book evokes the reality of life in a wartime city in all its brutality and deprivation, while retaining a kernel of hope that while life remains not all is lost.

The Bonfire Of Berlin

A moving and extraordinary book about courage and survival, friendship and endurance – a portrait of ordinary women who faced the horror of the holocaust together. 
 
On an icy morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz – the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. Of the group, only 49 survivors would return to France. 
 
 Here is the story of these women – told for the first time. A Train in Winter is a portrait of ordinary people, of their bravery and endurance, and of the friendships that kept so many of them alive. 
 
 ‘A story of stunning courage, generosity and hope’ Mail on Sunday 
 
‘Serious and heartfelt...profound’ Sunday Times

A Train in Winter

A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival in Auschwitz

Nicholas Gage

A son's quest to avenge his mother's murder. 
 
In 1948, in a Greek mountain village, Eleni Gatzoyiannis was arrested, tortured and shot. She was one of the 158,000 victims of the Greek Civil War. Her crime had been to help her children escape from the Communist guerrillas who occupied their village. Her son, Nicholas Gage, was then eight years old. Eleni is the story of his obsessive and harrowing reconstruction of his mother's life and death and his pursuit of his mother's killer.

Eleni

Thomas Keneally

In the 19th century the Irish population was halved. This masterly book traces the three causes of this depletion; first the manine, second the Irish diaspora and the emigrations to places such as America and Canada and thridly the transportations of political activists to Australia. It is a quest for Keneally's Irish ancestors. Based on unique research among little-used sources, the characters and their stories come brilliantly to life; this is an important book in which the main political themes are fascinatingly explored. It also contains a remarkable collection of photographs and documents.

The Great Shame

'Moorehead paints a wonderfully vivid and moving portrait of the women of the Italian Resistance' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES 
 
The extraordinary story of the courageous women who spearheaded the Italian Resistance during the Second World War 
 
In the late summer of 1943, in the midst of German occupation, the Italian Resistance was born. 
 
Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca were four young women who signed up. Living in the mountains surrounding Turin their contribution was invaluable. They carried messages and weapons, provided safe houses and took prisoners. As thousands of Italians rose up, they fought to liberate their country. 
 
With its corruption, greed and anti-Semitism, the fall of Fascist Italy was unrelentingly violent, but for the partisan women it was also a time of camaraderie and equality, pride and optimism. Through the stories of these four exceptional women, the resolve, tenacity and, above all, courage of the Italian Resistance is laid bare. 
 
A Spectator Book of the Year

A House in the Mountains

The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism

Annelise Freisenbruch

Like their modern counterparts, the 'first ladies' of Rome were moulded to meet the political requirements of their emperors, be they fathers, husbands, brothers or lovers. But the women proved to be liabilities as well as assets - Augustus' daughter Julia was accused of affairs with at least five men, Claudius' wife Messalina was a murderous tease who cuckolded and humiliated her elderly husband, while Fausta tried to seduce her own stepson and engineered his execution before boiled to death as a punishment. 
 
In The First Ladies of Rome Annelise Freisenbruch unveils the characters whose identities were to reverberate through the ages, from the virtuous consort, the sexually voracious schemer and the savvy political operator, to the flighty bluestocking, the religious icon and the romantic heroine. 
 
Using a rich spectrum of literary, artistic, archaeological and epigraphic evidence, this book uncovers for the first time the kaleidoscopic story of some of the most intriguing women in history, and the vivid and complex role of the empresses as political players on Rome's great stage.

The First Ladies of Rome

The Women Behind the Caesars

Christopher Koch

A leader of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, Robert Devereux is an Irish gentleman who is prepared to hazard a life of privilege in the fight for his country's freedom. 
 
Transported to Van Diemen's Land as a political prisoner, he enters a life that greatly changes him, falling in love with a young Irish convict woman. 
 
Through Kathleen O'Rahilly he comes to know the people he's long romanticised; but his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go.

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