Biography - Historical to 1945

In this close look at the narrative contained within the Bayeux Tapestry, an extraordinary secret tale of the final years of Anglo-Saxon England is revealed; a tale of a rival to Duke William's claim to the English throne, warrior bishops, court dwarfs and ruthless knights.

Henry V is regarded as the great English hero. With his victory at Agincourt and his rigorous application of justice, he was elevated by Shakespeare into a champion of English nationalism. But does he deserve to be thought of as 'the greatest man who ever ruled England?' Here Ian Mortimer portrays the dramatic events of 1415, offering the fullest, most precise and least romanticised view we have of Henry and what he did.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all "negroes and Jews." Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight, she went from performer to Resistance spy. 

In Agent Josephine, bestselling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer's life. During the war years, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers - a cover for her spying work - Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and emerged as a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served - the US, France, and Britain. 
 

In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1944, a thin, and unusually elegant, housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, Ursula Kuczynski -� codename Sonya �- was heading for the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific secrets from a nuclear physicist. Secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the atomic bomb. In Agent Sonya, Ben Macintyre reveals the astonishing story behind the most important woman spy in history and the huge emotional cost that came with being a mother, a wife, and a secret agent at once.

Amelia Earhart died mysteriously before she was forty, disappearing in the South Pacific on an around-the-world flight attempt in 1937. She was the best-known female aviator in the world, and set the record for the first trans-Atlantic solo flight by a woman, a flight that launched her on a double career as a fighter for women's rights and a tireless crusader for commercial air travel. And as her dream has persisted through the decades, so has her story, and her spirit.

The true story of Congressman Daniel Sickles, a womaniser and a cad, who shot his wife's lover in 1859, getting away with murder because of his close friendship with the president. Sickles went on to command a regiment in the Civil War and lead a life as extraordinary as any novel.

A moving account of how the author's quest to learn more about his grandfather revealed the shocking truth about a family he thought he knew; a truth that had been hidden for nearly a hundred years.

Doomed queen of Henry VIII, mother to Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn was the most controversial and scandalous woman ever to sit on the throne of England. From her early days at the imposing Hever Castle in Kent, to the glittering courts of Paris and London, Anne caused a stir wherever she went. This is the compelling story of one of history's most charismatic, controversial and tragic heroines.

Anne of Cleves was Henry VIII's least favourite wife - but the one who outlived them all. 'I like her not!' was the verdict of Henry VIII on meeting his fourth wife for the first time. But Anne was both intelligent and practical, ensuring that, whilst she was queen for the shortest period, she was the last of all Henry VIII's wives to survive.

Written by the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, this is the story of a personal tragedy that lay behind Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' theory and his revolutionary understanding of man's place in nature. The story of his daughter Annie who died when she was ten years old, and how this influenced Darwin.

As the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the author was well placed to observe the great, the good and the not-so-good of Victorian society. He records his observations with wit and humour.

An account of the Battle of Trafalgar written by William Beatty, M.D., who, as a surgeon on board HMS Victory, tended the dying Nelson. William Beatty had been in the Royal Navy for nine years when, in December 1804, he joined HMS Victory as one of its surgeons. His account of the most famous of all British sea battles, from the unique perspective of a ship’s surgeon, was an immediate success when it was published in 1807 and went into several editions. His subsequent medical career culminated in his appointment as Physician of Greenwich Hospital, and he was knighted by King William IV in 1831

A leading industrialist of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie was one of America's most successful and generous businessmen. The autobiography tells of his rise to power, from humble beginnings in Scotland to controlling the biggest steel empire in the history of the United States. In The Gospel of Wealth he writes about his philanthropy, revealing the reasons that famously led him to donate over 350 million dollars during his lifetime.

For a great part of his reign Henry VIII was concerned to produce a legitimate male heir, yet for much of this time he had a son, albeit illegitimate. Henry Fitzroy was born in 1519 and became the Duke of Richmond and Somerset in 1525. Educated as a Renaissance prince, how close did he get to becoming Henry IX?

A ground-breaking new study brings us a very different picture of the Second World War, asking fundamental questions about ethical commitments

Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten.

Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war five of these individuals: Roy Ridgway, a factory clerk from Liverpool; Tom Burns, a teacher from east London; Stella St John, who trained as a vet and ended up in jail; Ronald Duncan, who set up a collective farm; and Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scottish socialist and writer. We meet many more objectors along the way -- people both determined and torn -- and travel from Finland to Syria, India to rural England, Edinburgh to Trinidad.

Although conscientious objectors were often criticised and scorned, figures such as Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury supported their right to object, at least in principle, suggesting that liberty of conscience was one of the freedoms the nation was fighting for. And their rich cultural and moral legacy -- of humanitarianism and human rights, from Amnesty International and Oxfam to the US civil rights movement -- can still be felt all around us.

The personal and political struggles carefully and vividly collected in this book tell us a great deal about personal and collective freedom, conviction and faith, war and peace, and pose questions just as relevant today: Does conscience make us free? Where does it take us? And what are the costs of going there?

Considered by many the world’s greatest composer, Ludwig van Beethoven achieved his ambitions against the difficulties of a bullying and drunken father, growing deafness and mounting ill-health. Here, Anne Pimlott Baker tells the story of the German composer’s life and work, from his birth in Bonn in 1770 and his early employment as a court musician, to his death in Vienna in 1827. She describes his studies with Haydn in Vienna and his work during the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. His most financially successful period followed the Congress of Vienna in 1815, despite several unhappy love affairs and continuous worry over his nephew, Karl. Beethoven is a concise, illuminating biography of a true virtuoso.

Dido Belle was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain and a slave woman, adopted by the Earl of Mansfield. As Lord Chief Justice of England he would preside over the drowning of 142 slaves by a shipping company. This is the story of a family that defied convention, the legal trial that exposed the cruelties of slavery and the woman who challenged notions of race at the highest rank.

This is a study of a flawed yet characterful Prince of Wales, seen through the eyes of the women in his life. Bertie's numerous mistresses included the society hostess Daisy Brook, Lillie Langtry and Alice Keppel. Edward VII was 59 when at last he came to the throne and was King of England for the final 10 years of his life.

After forty years Janina Bauman is ready to tell the story of her life and experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto during the holocaust.

Pierre Clostermann was one of the oustanding Allied aces of the Second World War. A Frenchman who flew with the RAF, he survived over 420 operational sorties, shooting down scores of enemy aircraft while friends and comrades lost their lives in the deadly skies above Europe. This is his extraordinary account which has been described as the greatest pilot's memoir of WWII.

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's Black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age - slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Here, in all its drama, is the epic story of the world's first Black superhero.

Frances Osborne explores the story of her great–grandmother, the Bolter of the title, who left her husband and children to pursue a life of sexual profligacy around the time of the Great War. Richard & Judy Bookclub

In 1965 the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men, women and children. Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their midst. The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the 1930s, in an attempt to understand 'how it really was, that incomprehensible time'.

He had grown up in a Berlin suburb, among a community of decent, lower-middle-class homeowners. This was not the world of torch-lit processions and endless ranks of marching SA men. Here, people lived ordinary, non-political lives, believed in God and obeyed the law, but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the promises of Nazism. He had been, Krüger realised, 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. This world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble when tragedy struck. Krüger's older sister decided to take her own life, leaving the parents struggling to come to terms with the inexplicable.

The author's teenage rebellion, his desire to escape the stifling conformity of family life, made him join an anti-Nazi resistance group. He narrowly escaped imprisonment only to be sent to war as Hitler embarked on the conquest of Europe. Step by step, a family that had fallen under the spell of Nazism was being destroyed by it. Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides an unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis. Yet the book's themes also chime with our own times - how the promise of an 'era of greatness' by a populist leader intoxicates an entire nation, how thin is the veneer of civilisation, and what makes one person a collaborator and another a resister.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6.45 a.m., Sunday 4 June 1944. He was 20 years old, unblooded, fresh from a public-school background and Officer Cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk, he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank (of the non-swimming variety), engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction. His story of that journey through hell to victory makes for compulsive reading.

In Cook's relatively short and adventurous life (1728-79) he voyaged to the eastern and western seaboards of North America, the North and South Pacific and the Arctic and Antarctic bringing about a new comprehension of the world's geography and its people's. He was the linking figure between the grey specualtion of the early eighteenth century and the industrial age of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Born to a leading Italian family, Catherine de Medici became one of the most important figures in European history. Married to Henri II of France, she also saw three of her sons wear the Crown of France. Unloved by her husband, and ever jealous of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, this is a story of politics, passion, hatred and vengeance.

Catherine is remembered as the wife of King Henry VIII who survived but, without her strength of character it could have been very different. This biography shows another side to Catherine. Her life was indeed one of duty but, throughout, she attempted to escape her destiny and find happiness for herself. Ultimately, Catherine was betrayed and her great love affair with Thomas Seymour turned sour.

An abridged version of the author's biographical portrait of Charles II - popular with his people and in control of his country when he died.

Although an arranged marriage between two branches of the Rothschild banking family, this became a love match to rival that of Victoria and Albert. Charlotte became one of the great hostesses of Victorian England and Lionel became England's leading financier and the first Jew to win a seat in Parliament.

Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in 20th-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world. There have been over a thousand biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts now draws on over forty new sources, including the private diaries of King George VI, to depict him more intimately and persuasively than any of its predecessors.

The four MacDonald sisters each married to become Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louise Baldwin. Between them they were wife or mother to a great writer, two painters and a Prime Minister!

Thomas Cochrane was second only to Nelson as a hero of the Royal Navy, and his real life exploits in the Napoleonic Wars read like some of the very best adventure stories.

A re-telling of the mysterious adventures of Cromwell’s head and its remarkable travels after death, this book also examines the character of Cromwell, his many talents and contradictions.

Since Goronwy Rees's death, his daughter Jenny has had to cope with the frequently made allegation that her father was another of the spies recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s. He never disguised his friendship with Guy Burgess who, with Donald Maclean, had defected to Moscow in 1951, and in 1979 Rees helped Andrew Boyle unmask Anthony Blunt, the Fourth Man. 

So, was Rees himself actually a spy? The opening of KGB files has acted as a spur to Jenny Rees in her quest to exorcise the past. The result is full of unexpected revelation, made all the more moving as she discovers for the first time the secret life of her father.

Previously published as Looking for Mr Nobody. 

A unique series of letters between a young airman, Tony Ross, and Joan Charles, a girl he met briefly in England before he was posted to the Mediterranean during the Second World War. These letters trace the development of their relationship from friendship to long-lasting love.