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.

1943: Five Army aviators left Alaska's Ladd Field on a routine flight to test their B-24 Liberator in harsh winter conditions. The mission ended in a crash that claimed all but one - Leon Crane. With only a parachute for cover and an old Boy Scout knife in his pocket, Crane found himself alone in subzero temperatures. Crane knew that his chance of survival dropped swiftly with each passing day. This is his story.

Joan Park recounts her childhood years growing up in Liverpool from 1927 to 1936. The daughter of a ship steward and a housewife, she captures the atmosphere of ordinary family life in pre-war Britain .

Book 2 of the ‘Joan Park’ series. Sequel to ’86 SMITH STREET’ (8680). In this continuation of her memoirs, Joan takes us back to the early years of the War. The family have moved to a new housing estate on the edge of Liverpool and there are new schools and new friends to cope with.

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.

On a chill December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort. His German masters called him Fritz, or Fritzchen. The British police knew him as Eddie Chapman. Within weeks Chapman was in the hands of MI5 and operating as Agent Zigzag.

Agent Zo tells the incredible true story of Elżbieta Zawacka, the WW2 resistance fighter known as 'Zo'. The only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, Zo undertook two missions in the capital before secret Special Operations Executive training in the British countryside.

As the only female member of the Polish elite Special Forces, Zo became the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland. There, whilst being hunted by the Gestapo (who arrested her entire family), she played a key role in the Warsaw Uprising and ultimately in the liberation of Poland.

After the war, Zo was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her but ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years.

The author was just eighteen years old when he enlisted in the RAF as a pilot. After training he served in the Middle East for four years with no home leave. This is the account of one man's war.

Alexander Hamilton was an illegitimate self-taught orphan from the Caribbean who overcame all the odds to become George Washington's aide-de-camp and the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Few figures in American history are more controversial than Alexander Hamilton. In this masterful work, Chernow shows how the political and economic power of America today is the result of Hamilton's willingness to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. He charts his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe and Burr; his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds; his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza; and the notorious duel with Aaron Burr that led to his death in July 1804.

In the first part of this book Lessing explores the lives of her parents, Alfred and Emily, in a fictional world spared the misery of World War I. It ends with a short biographical piece on how these two people actually met and lived, their lives defined and ruined by this same event..

Klara Andersen was born in Germany in 1924. She came to Britain in 1950 and has constantly asked been about how ordinary Germans viewed Hitler and Nazism. Viewed through a young persons eye, this volume covers the years 1932 - 1948.

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.

Sad, funny and bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 30s and Ireland in the 40s.

Anne Boleyn is a subject of enduring fascination. For the most part, she is considered in the context of her relationship with Tudor England's much-married monarch. Dramatic though this story is, of even greater interest - and significance - is the relationship between Anne and her daughter, the future Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth was less than three years old when her mother was executed. Given that she could have held precious few memories of Anne, it is often assumed that her mother exerted little influence over her. But this is both inaccurate and misleading.

Piecing together evidence from original documents and artefacts, this book tells the story of Anne Boleyn's relationship with, and influence over her daughter Elizabeth. In so doing, it sheds new light on two of the most famous and influential women in history.

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.

Sequel to 'A Kind Of magic'. Molly Harris describes her journeys over the hills and through the villages of the Cotswolds. Her extensive knowledge of the area and the Cotswold way of life is entertaining and captivating.

Emma Smith recalls in evocative detail the quality of England in the thirties and forties, with her customary verve, precision and humour.

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.

When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he was asked to swear allegiance to Hitler and join the Wehrmacht. He refused. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer, he was ordered by the SS to record the inner workings of the camp. He began by taking identification photographs of prisoners, went on to capture criminal medical experiments, and also recorded executions. Between 1940 and 1945, Brasse took around 50,000 photographs of the horror around him. He took them because he had no choice.

Eventually, Brasse's conscience wouldn't allow him to hide behind his camera. First he risked his life by joining the camp's Resistance movement. Then, when Soviet troops finally advanced on the camp to liberate it, Brasse refused SS orders to destroy his photographs. 'Because the world must know,' he said.

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.

In 1938, 18-year-old Phyllis Ellsworth sets off from her quiet seaside home for Hackney Hospital in London's bustling East End, where she is to fulfill her dream to train as a nurse. But when Britain declares war on Germany, her eagerness to do good in the world brings her suddenly face to face with death and drama in all its many guises.

The author reminisces about his life growing up near the shores of Lough Eine in Fermanagh. He tells sof the innocence of the country people in the 40s and 50s and how witty they were.

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.

A colourful insight into the upstairs-downstairs world of domestic service, in which the author describes her progression from one large house to another to find her unassailable place in the strictly organized below-stairs hierarchy.

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was perhaps the best-known, most highly respected and most controversial British general of World War II. He made an incalculable contribution to the Allied victory in Europe, and his leadership played a crucial role in transforming the British Army into a war-winning weapon.

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.

In 1949, Staff Nurse Georgie Edwards, against the odds, wins herself a place to study medicine at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital and she sets about becoming a consultant who listens and cares. Is this one dream too many for a woman in the 1950s?