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Valerie Grove

Frank and funny, unorthodox, liberated and quintessentially English, Dodie Smith, playwright and novelist, was the author of those immortal classics, The Hundred and One Dalmations and I Capture the Castle. One of the most successful dramatists of her generation, she spent the war years in America, befriended Christopher Isherwood and, through Walt Disney's film, became a household name.

Dear Dodie

The Life of Dodie Smith

A.N. Wilson

A. N. Wilson's sympathetic, readable and brilliantly analytical narrative places John Milton, the greatest poet of the seventeenth century, in the context of his political and religious ideas.

The Life of John Milton

Tom Pocock

Alan Moorehead was lionised as a literary man of action: the most famous war correspondent of the Second World War; the award-winning and best-selling author of books that vividly combin adventure and hisotry; the star travel-writer of the New Yorker; and a pioneer advocate of wildlife conservation. Drawing on Moorehead's diaries and correspondence, as well as interviews with his family and friends, Tom Pocock tells the story of a thrilling, but ultimately tragic, life.

Alan Moorehead

Isabelle Tombs

Robert Tombs

From Blenheim and Waterloo to 'Up Yours, Delors' and 'Hop Off You Frogs', the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry, misapprehension and suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy, admiration and affection. 
 
In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon, France and Britain have spent much of that time as allies - an alliance that has been almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on peace and war, for good and ill, has shaped the modern world, from North America to India in the eighteenth century, in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is still shaping Europe today. 
 
This magisterial book, by turns provocative and delightful, always fascinating, tells the rich and complex story of the relationship over three centuries, from the beginning of the great struggle for mastery during the reign of Louis XIV to the second Iraq War and the latest enlargement of the EU. It tells of wars and battles, ententes and alliances, but also of food, fashion, sport, literature, sex and music. Its cast ranges from William and Mary to Tony Blair, from Voltaire to Eric Cantona; its sources from ambassadorial dispatches to police reports, from works of philosophy to tabloid newspapers, from guidebooks to cartoons and films. 
 
It's a book which brings both British humour and Gallic panache to the story of these two countries, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, in victory and in defeat, in dominance and in decline.

That Sweet Enemy

The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present

Peter J Gwyn

Proud, greedy, corrupt and driven by overwhelming personal ambition. Such is the traditional image of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, Abbot of St. Albans, Bishop if Tournai and Papal Legate. It is an image which Peter Gwyn examines, challenges and decisively overturns in this remarkable book. 
 
From exceedingly humble beginnings Wolsey rose to a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any other British commoner. Peter Gwyn explores every aspect of the Cardinal's career - not least his relationship with Henry VIII - and sets it firmly in a vividly recreated Tudor world. The Wolsey who emerges is a man of prodigious energy and ability, a tireless dispenser of justice, an enlightened reformer wholly dedicated to his king and country - a man who has been consistently misrepresented and maligned for four-and-a-half centuries.

The King's Cardinal

The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey

Gregor Dallas

The seventeen months from April 1814 to August 1815 were an extraordinary period in European history; a period which saw two sieges of Paris, a complete revision of Europe's political frontiers, an international Congress set up in Vienna, civil war in Italy and international war in Belgium.Gregor Dallas tells the story of these days through the perspectives of three very different European cities: the great metropolis of London, post-revolutionary Paris and baroque Vienna.  The writing is almost cinematic in its power to evoke and bring to life the Europe of Tolstoy: the ebb and flow of power, of armies and of peoples across Europe's northern plains.  Working essentially from primary sources, Dallas is as interested in the weather conditions before battle as in the way cartoonists reacted to court intrigues and fashions.It is also Europe seen through the eyes of its central players: Talleyrand, who has served nearly every French regime since the Revolution of 1789; Metternich, who devises new plans for a 'Germany' that does not yet exist and for a 'Europe' that remains devided; Wellington, who reveals himself a diplomat as well as a soldier; Tsar Alexander, an idealist seeking to impose a uniform plan for all Europe; and 'Boney' himself, who has his own ideal of Europe and, though banished to Elba, does not abandon his dream to realise it.

1815

The Roads to Waterloo

Roger Osborne

The Floating Egg begins with the search for an alchemist's secret, and ends with the re-imagination of a past world. Each chapter is connected to a particular corner of north-east England, and each explores the uncertain line where myth is dissolved into science, and belief gives way to knowledge. 
 
Different episodes show how the fall of Constantinople converted the common rock of the Yorkshire cliffs into a source of extraordinary wealth and power, and how this in turn uncovered the inhabitants of a succession of past worlds; how a stone falling from the sky near this same coast changed the minds of all the natural philosophers of Europe; and how a new science was born on the top of the tower of York Minster. We learn about the cloak-and-dagger world of fossil trading in the town of Whitby; and we see the entire life-work of a forgotten scientific genius who died from consumption at the age of twenty-five, having revolutionised his science. 
 
The stories move from documentary accounts to fictional recreations of historic events, from contemporary writing and illustrations to present-day reflection. By using different ways of describing the world of scientific endeavour, the author has produced a fascinating visually beautiful and highly entertaining book which allows us to witness the birth of a new science - the science of geology.

The Floating Egg

Episodes in the Making of Geology

Hilaire Belloc

Here is the distinctly surreal world of Henry King, who perished through his 'chief defect' of chewing little bits of string; of dishonest Matilda whose dreadful lies led her to death by burning; and of Godolphin Horne who 'held the human race in scorn' and ended as the boy 'who blacks the boots at the Savoy'. 
 
Here too are the beautiful lyrics of longing and loss; the sonnets and epigrams; the hugely enjoyable Bad Child's Book of Beasts - not to mention More Beasts for Worse Children; and The Modern Traveller, one of the finest satirical poems in English. 
 
Complete Verse reveals all of Hilaire Belloc's dazzling range and makes plain why he is one of the most truly popular poets of modern times.

Complete Verse

James Wood

When James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999, the reviewers hailed a master critic. The common thread in Wood's latest collection of essays is what makes us laugh - and the book is an attempt to distinguish between the perhaps rather limited English comedy (as seen in Waugh, for example) and a 'continental' tragic-comedy, which he sees as real, universal and quixotic. 
 
A particularly acerbic, and very funny, essay - which has been widely celebrated - deals with Zadie Smith, Rushdie, Pynchon and DeLillo; its title, 'Hysterical Realism', has already entered the phrasebook of literary language. 
 
With its brilliant studies of Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Naipaul, Pritchett and Bellow, The Irresponsible Self offers more exhilarating despatches from one of our finest living critics.

The Irresponsible Self

On Laughter and the Novel

Richard Aldous

‘Engaging and highly entertaining’ Sunday Times 
 
 The dramatic confrontation between the two 'mighty opposites' of the Victorian age, brilliantly recreated by a talented young historian. 
 
 Gladstone and Disraeli were the fiercest political rivals of the modern age. Their intense hatred was ideological and deeply personal. Victorian Britain ruled the oceans and vast territories 'on which the sun never set'. The vitriolic duel between Gladstone and Disraeli was nothing less than a battle to lead the richest and most powerful nation on earth. 
 
 To Disraeli, his antagonist was an 'unprincipled maniac' characterised by an 'extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition'. For Gladstone, his rival was 'The Grand Corrupter' whose destruction he plotted 'day and night, week by week, month by month'. Victorians were electrified by the confrontation. No wonder that when Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass appeared in 1871, so many readers recognised the great adversaries as the warring lion and unicorn 'fighting for the crown'. 
 
 Richard Aldous gives us the first modern telling of this dramatic story of an intense and momentous rivalry. His vivid narrative style - at turns powerful, witty, stirring and theatrical - breathes new life into a familiar, half-remembered tale that is pivotal in Britain's island history. The Lion and the Unicorn is a brilliant rethinking of the Gladstone and Disraeli story for a new generation. 
 
Richard Aldous confirms a perennial truth: in politics, everything is personal.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Gladstone vs Disraeli

Michael Levey

In this evocative memoir Michael Levey recreates a between-the-wars English childhood outwardly ordinary and undramatic, but inwardly rich, stirring, sometimes bewildering, and altogether far from typical, not least in its pervasive Catholic ethos. An only child, intensely self-aware, devout, yet questioning, as well as imaginative, drawn to Shakespeare and the theatre, and to all things visual, he grew up in Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast.  He attended a succession of Catholic schools, before joining the Army at the very end of the War.  Notably entertaining is his account of service life, spent partly in Egypt, as is the final chapter, which finds him arriving at the National Gallery in London, to begin a career that would culminate in his being appointed Director.With its precise evocation of a child's relationship with the world around him and with his parents - a couple united in reticent affection and intelligence, but totally opposed in temperament - The Chapel is on Fire will surely become a classic in the literature of childhood.

The Chapel is on Fire

Kate Chisholm

Dr Johnson is often thought of as a strident, overbearing conversationalist, a man who famously asserted that 'Women have all the liberty they should wish to have'. But in this revealing book Kate Chisholm argues it is time to consider how Johnson lived his life, not just what he said. She proposes that the heart of the man, the truth of his character, can more clearly be seen via his many - close, generous, equal - relationships with women. 
 
At one end of the spectrum were Johnson's mother Sarah; his 'painted poppet' wife Tetty; and the women, like the prostitute Poll Carmichael and the blind poetess Anna Williams, he took in when they had nowhere else to go. At the other end were Mary Wollstonecraft, who refers to Johnson in Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Hester Thrale, renowned wit and Johnson's 'dear mistress'; Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus was an instant bestseller; and many more besides. 
 
By looking again at this controversial figure through the eyes of this extraordinary cast of female characters, we can discover the essential and unexpected Johnson.

Wits and Wives

Dr Johnson in the Company of Women

Russell Miller

Compiled from interviews, diaries, letters and contemporaneous first-person accounts - many never before published - this oral history follows the adventures of the courageous men and women who volunteered for service with Britain's Special Operations Executives and the United States' Office of Strategic Services. They parachuted behind enemy lines, often alone, with orders to cause mayhem. Arrest almost always resulted in torture and emprisonment; sometimes in execution. In occupied France, equipped with false identities, they played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo; in the Balkans they discovered that the fiery politics of the region were as dangerous as the enemy; in the Burmese jungle they led native marauders in surprise attacks against the Japanese. Supported by a team of back-room boffins who dreamed up ingenious devices like exploding rats and invisible ink, the special agents of World War Two really were a breed apart. This is their extraordinary story, in their own words.

Behind The Lines

The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II

John Prebble

This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the 'Common Men' on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chatten and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Andrew Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chatten to reach him, likening them to 'a troop of hungry wolves'. Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles' army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-soldier's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle is as much a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.

Culloden

David Kynaston

A World of Its Own tells the story of the City of London's nineteenth century ascent to its position as the world's leading international financial centre. We witness the rise of the merchant banks, the growth of the Stock Exchange, the internationalism of the money market, and the characters behind these developments, like the mercurial Nathan Rothschild or the dour Joshua Bates. 
 
High history is interwoven with high drama: the burning of the Royal Exchange on a snowy night in 1838, the hectic making of fortunes from South American guano; the Baring crisis of 1890, when the city's most respected house was rescued by its keenest rival. A World of Its Own is at once a powerful narrative, peopled with extraordinary characters, and a brilliant work of social and economic history.

The City Of London Volume 1

A World of its Own 1815-1890

Bryan Magee

This utterely compelling memoir opens with a sceptical nine-year-old Bryan Magee being taught the facts of life. It goes on to tell the story of the Second World War as seen through a child's eyes. 
 
Growing Up in a War nostalgically evokes the atmostphere of wartime England, the community spirit of a society before television, where very few had cars or telephones. A kid from the East End, he won a scholarship to one of the country's ancient public schools. During the school holidays, he returned to London and the air raids, the doodlebugs and V2 rockets. 
 
With the war over, Bryan's school sent him to a Lycée in Versailles, and he explored the Paris of those post-war years. Then, back in England, he tumbled into his first love affair. The book comes to an end with his call-up into the army, and his unexpected posting to the School of Military Intelligence. 
 
Growing Up in a War is a stunning autobiography and account of Britain during an extraordinary period of history, by the winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography.

Growing Up In A War

Nigel Tattersfield

`I pray people will read this richly detailed and absorbing book, with its vivid renaissance of a matter most of us English seem to have wished into oblivion. ' John Fowles Meticulously kept by Walter Prideaux, the log of the Daniel and Henry provides an astonishing record of a trading venture in the year 1700. Two years earlier, the Guinea trade had been prised loose by an Act of Parliament from the monopoly of the Royal African Company, and respectable burghers in a dozen small provincial ports seized what they saw as an opportunity for quick rewards from the slave trade. Few of these merchants knew anything of trading in Africa, nor of the unscrupulous tribalchiefs who readily offered men, women and children in hard bargaining for beads, alcohol, weapons and gunpowder. In the second part of this book, Tattersfield went in search of long-forgotten documents to chart how small provincial ports fared both economically and morally in the early years of slave trading.

The Forgotten Trade

Comprising the Log of the Daniel and Henry of 1700 and Accounts of the Slave Trade From the Minor Ports of England 1698-1725

Hermione Lee

As readers, we seem to be increasingly fascinated by studies of individual lives. In this timely, unusual and exhilarating collection Hermione Lee is concerned in different ways with approaches to 'life-writing': the relation of biography to fiction and history; the exploration of writers' lives in connection with their works; the new and changing ways in which biographies, memoirs, diaries and autobiographies can be discussed. 
 
As the title suggests, she also unravels the complex links between physical, sensual details and the 'body' of a work. 'Shelley's Heart and Pepys' Lobsters', for example, deals with myths, contested objects and things that go missing, while 'Jane Austen Faints' takes five varied accounts of the same dramatic moment to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women, a theme taken up in 'Virginia Woolf's Nose', on the way that the author's life-stories have been transformed into fiction and film. 
 
Rich, diverting and entertaining, these brilliant studies by a leading critic and internationally acclaimed biographer raise profound and intriguing issues about every aspect of writing, and reading, a life.

Body Parts

Essays on Life-Writing

Ben Shephard

'I wish you could be here," the Oxford Professor of Medicine wrote to a friend in 1915, "in this orgy of neuroses and psychoses and gaits and paralyses. I cannot imagine what has got into the central nervous system of the men.' 
 
A War of Nerves is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century - an authoritative, accessible account drawing on a vast range of diaries, interviews, medical papers and official records. It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of mental medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of 'shell-shock', combat fatigue and 'post-traumatic stress disorder'. 
 
At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, it tells the full story of 'shell-shock'; explains the disastrous psychological aftermath of Vietnam; and shows how psychiatrists kept men fighting in Burma. But it also tries to answer recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology or simple biochemistry? It explores the ethical dilemmas of the military psychiatrist - the 'machine gun behind the front', as Freud called him. Finally, it looks at the modern culture of 'trauma' and compensation spawned by the Vietnam War. 
 
A War of Nerves offers the general reader an indispensable guide to an important and controversial subject.

A War Of Nerves

Gillian Tindall

Just across the River Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare’s Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London’s marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements – and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air. 
 
Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house – the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London’s numberless poor. In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others and for a whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London’s history.

The House By The Thames

And The People Who Lived There

Ian Young

Ian Young spent a summer as a medical student in a provincial maternity unit in Algeria.  This book is taken from the diary he began on arrival, when he found himself the privileged witness of the insides not just of Kabyl women, but also some much-trumpeted ideology. The immediate villains are a couple of expatriate Bulgarian gynaecologists.  Dr Vasilev, at the closing stages of a career of fathomless incompetence, forms a bond of affection with the author and they spend many hours in the office over an old route map of Bulgaria, discussing mileages and motorcycles as Maternity drifts beneath them like an abandoned ship.  Dr Kostov packs a powerful bedside punch and saves his humanitarian feelings for the health of the Deutschmark.  The two form a macabre comic team as they take the reader through a series of medical nightmares.  But their lot is scarcely more enviable than that of their female victims: the foreign doctors are the unhappy executors, working in blood, excrement and death, of the most respected attitudes in Algeria. The Private Life of Islam is a ruthlessly clear-sighted view of a particular place at a particular time.  It is also a classic in the art of story-telling.'A real achievement, personal as well as literary.' David Pryce-Jones, The Times'A parable of the reality behind a vast amount of modern social and political fantasy, even in the most developed of countries.' David Holden, Sunday Times

The Private Life Of Islam

An Algerian Diary

Jeremy Lewis

`In one of tje funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure has robbed the litarary world of its social smartness and any worthwhile eccentricity . . . [An] excellent, wildly funny and informative biography. `Auberon Waugh, Literary Review. Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romatic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. As witty in person as he as in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was married three times, abd his dealings with women were bedevilled by a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once.

Cyril Connolly

A Life

Norman Longmate

Although nearly 90% of the population of Great Britain remained civilians throughout the war, or for a large part of it, their story has so far largely gone untold. In contrast with the thousands of books on military operations, barely any have concerned themselves with the individual's experience. The problems of the ordinary family are barely ever mentioned - food rationing, clothes rationing, the black-out and air raids get little space, and everyday shortages almost none at all. 
 
This book is an attempt to redress the balance; to tell the civilian's story largely through their own recollections and in their own words.

How We Lived Then

History of Everyday Life During the Second World War, A

Samuel Hynes

This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action. In the process a generation discovered itself and found its own expression.

The Auden Generation

Anthony Read

The Nazi regime was essentially a religious cult, relying on the hypnotic personality of one man, Adolf Hitler, and it was fated to die with him. But while it lasted, his closest lieutenants competed ferociously for power and position as his chosen successor. This deadly contest accounted for many of the regime's worst excesses, in which millions of people died, and which brought Western civilization to its knees. The Devil's Disciples is the first major book for a general readership to examine those lieutenants, not only as individuals but also as a group. It focuses on the three Nazi paladins closest to Hitler - Goring, Goebbels and Himmler - with their nearest rivals - Bormann, Speer and Ribbentrop in close attendance. Others who were removed in various ways - like Gregor Strasser, Ernst R-hm, Heydrich and Hess - play supporting roles. Perceptive and illuminating, The Devil's Disciples is above all a powerful chronological narrative, showing how the personalities of Hitler's inner circle developed and how their jealousies and constant intrigues affected the regime, the war, and Hitler himself.

The Devil's Disciples

Michael Wood

In this absorbing series of essays Michael Wood probes and plays with the dilemmas of twentieth century fiction - the myth of lost paradise, lost certainties, the suspension between contrary ideals, the lure of fantasy, the quest for the silence beneath speech. Wood's net is cast wide, from fables to novels, and he takes due account of personal and political context and of wider cultural and critical currents, noting fiction's swerving resistance to `history'. A superb essay on Roland Barthes is juxtaposed with a dissection of Beckett's prose comedy; an investigation of three Cuban writers -Cortazar, Cabrera Infante and Arenas - is followed by illuminating essays on Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino. In the second half of the book, the exploration of time, form and fantasy, and of the break with modernism, continues in studies of Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster and Jeanette Winterson. Rich with pleasures, spiked with insights, provocative and satisfying, this is one of the most exciting explorations of contemporary literature in recent years.

Children Of Silence

Studies in Contemporary Fiction

Peter Fleming

Catching all the fascination and humour of travel in out-of-the-way places, One's Company is Peter Fleming's account of his journey through Russia and Manchuria to China when he was Special Correspondent to The Times in the 1930s. Fleming spent seven months with the 'object of investigating the Communist situation in South China' at a time when, as far as he knew, 'no previous journey had been made to the anti-communist front by a foreigner', and on its publication in 1934, One's Company won widespread critical acclaim. Packed with classic incidents - brake-failure on the Trans-Siberian Express, the Eton Boating Song singing lesson in Manchuria - One's Company was among the forerunners of a whole new approach to travel writing.

One's Company

A Journey to China in 1933

On the night of 7 November 1918 French troops at La Capelle, on the Western Front, noticed a soft halo develop in the fog over no man's land.  They heard the rumble of cars, then perceived the vague form of a huge white flag: the Germans were crossing the line to seek peace.  But who were these Germans and what exactly did they represent?  By the time they had signed an armistice, four days later, not even they knew.  The Kaiser's Reich had collapsed and Germany faced chaos, while the war in Eastern Europe continued. This book traces the transition from war to peace across Europe.  It follows the movement of armies over the northern plains, their collapse, their demoblization, and the effect this had on the material life of people.  In Russia there had already been a revolution.  In Germany, there were attempts to overthrow the provisional republican government.  In Poland new wars broke out.  At the same time, there was celebration in the West at the announcement of the Armistice.  And the United States entered European politics with a new part to play. Dallas follows these dramatic events from the perspective of five capitals: Berlin, Paris, London, Moscow and Washington.  In Berlin the cabarets and beer halls are open, while there is shooting in the streets.  In the walled city of Paris, the peacemakers assemble to respond to the call for a League of Nations.  Pantomime season opens in London, where Lloyd George holds elections and reorganizes his War Cabinet; John Maynard Keynes of the Treasury worries about debts.  Contemporaries describe Moscow as a scene of desolation; but Lenin insists on setting up the Third International.  Washington is divided between those who want to open America to the world, and those who would prefer the world to go away. The start of peace is more complex and fascinating than the start of war; it sets the habits and builds the patterns of life for generations to come.  This book weaves politics, ideas, social life, fears, aspirations and harsh realities into a seamless reconstruction of life experienced at a great turning-point of history.

1918

War and Peace

Hugh Brogan

For a man who longed for a quiet existence, Arthur Ransome led a remarkably adventurous life. His bohemian years as a writer in Chelsea before the First World War closed with the agony of his prosecution for Libel by Lord Alfred Douglas. His two marriages - first to an unstable fantasist and later to a formidable Russian who had been Trotsky's secretary - were, to say the least, stormy. As a journalist he had a ringside view of the Russian Revolution and travelled widely in the Middle East and China. It was not until he was 45 and settled in the Lake District that he embarked, in the Swallows and Amazons stories, on some of the best loved books ever written for children.

The Life Of Arthur Ransome

Piers Brendon

In his account of four characters, each of whose importance was global, each of them, in their different ways, 'monsters', Piers Brendon writes wittily, sharply and succinctly - and brilliantly illuminates an age. His cast is as follows: Lord Northcliffe, the creator of modern journalism; Arthur Balfour, at the centre of the British political stage for half a century, and inspirer of the Balfour Declaration which changed the face of the Middle East; Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Suffragettes, whose personal gentility contrasted so oddly with her violent activities; and Baden-Powell, the Boy Scout who never really grew up, but who created a movement that spread to almost every country in the world. Piers Brendon maintains that the Edwardian era has been obfuscated by huge biographies. With four shafts of superb irony he penetrates the mists.

Eminent Edwardians

Four figures who defined their age: Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell

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