Thomas Harding

June 2006: Allan Chappelow, an award-winning photographer and biographer, was found battered to death at his house in Hampstead. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam; Thomas Harding has spent the past two years investigating the case, and has unearthed shocking new material on the killing.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander is one of the lead investigators, Rudolf Höss his most elusive target.

In 1993, Thomas Harding travelled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a house by a lake. It had been a holiday home that her family had been forced to leave as the Nazis swept to power. As he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there, he realised that this house had withstood the trauma of a world war, and the dividing of a nation.

In the early 1800s, Lehmann Gluckstein and his family escaped Eastern Europe and made their way to London’s East End. There, starting with nothing, they worked tirelessly to create a small tobacco factory that grew to become the largest catering company in the world: J Lyons. It was an ascent from rags to riches in the face of many obstacles: poverty, hatred and anti-Semitism stood between this poor immigrant family and the British Dream.