The Battle of Trafalgar is well-known for the magnanimous nature of the British victory, even though it cost the nation its greatest hero Lord Admiral, Horatio Nelson. For this reason, the battle itself has been remembered as a momentary success, the resulted only from a stroke of immediate genius or from a brief plan. But as Alan Schom shows, the Battle of 21 October 1805, a meeting of the might of the British and French navies, was the result of a strategy laid out by the British Admiralty two years earlier, in 1803. The period from that year until the Battle of Trafalgar was known as 'the Great Terror', when British naval forces were on constant alert for attacks by the Frenchman. Various political figures are written about, debating manoeuvres and quota of ships to be constructed, and putting down mutinies. Exploring previously unexplored archives of both England and France, Schom places Trafalgar in the context of the era. He draws portraits of the key personnel on both sides, such as Dumouriez, Decrès, Talleyrand, Berthier, Pitt, Cornwallis and Castlereagh. There is also a comprehensive discussion of the growth of the French naval fleet, helped by Dutch ships, and the preparations to build ports, which were hampered by their extraordinary costs and inclement weather. There are detailed descriptions of the fleets meeting during the run-in to Trafalgar, and Schom is engaging and sometimes humorous in his commentary on events. He also debunks several myths which should put an end to certain debates pertaining to a great battle of modern history. "[A] riveting narrative...Lively, dramatic." - Kirkus Reviews "Fresh and ever interesting...Triumphantly justifies adding to an already crowded bookshelf...The style is vigorous, the narrative packed with facts but relieved with excellently chosen quotations and off-beat insights." - The Sunday Times "Deftly drawn biographies bring to life the principal actors in the great drama...A thoroughly researched and splendidly written book." - The Los Angeles Times Book Review Alan Schom was a professor of French and European history before retiring to write full-time. He is the author of Emile Zola: A Biography and One Hundred Days: The Road to Waterloo .

"Those people who were betrayed were not innocent people. They were no better nor worse than I am. It's all part of the intelligence world. If the man who turned me in came to my house today, I'd invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea. George Blake was the last remaining Cold War spy. As a Senior Officer in the British Intelligence Service who was double agent for the Soviet Union, his actions had devastating consequences for Britain. Yet he was also one of the least known double agents, and remained unrepentant. In 1961, Blake was sentenced to forty-two years imprisonment for betraying to the KGB all of the Western operations in which he was involved, and the names of hundreds of British agents working behind the Iron Curtain. This was the longest sentence for espionage ever to have been handed down by a British court. On the surface, Blake was a charming, intelligent and engaging man, and most importantly, a seemingly committed patriot. Underneath, a ruthlessly efficient mole and key player in the infamous 'Berlin Tunnel' operation. This illuminating biography tracks Blake from humble beginnings as a teenage courier for the Dutch underground during the Second World War, to the sensational prison-break from Wormwood Scrubs that inspired Hitchcock to write screenplay. Through a combination of personal interviews, research and unique access to Stasi records, journalist Simon Kuper unravels who Blake truly was, what he was capable of, and why he did it"--Publisher's description

One of only two post-war Prime Ministers who can claim to have changed the society in which we live, Attlee was the architect of the NHS and the Welfare State. Beckett presents a biography of the great - and greatly underrated - Labour leader.

Recounts the Holocaust rescue efforts from London of Rabbi Schonfeld (1912-1984) via the organization he founded, the Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council. He was influenced by his teacher, Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, who rescued Jews in Europe. Despite the opposition of assimilationist, antisemitism-fearing members of the British Jewish establishment, and of some Zionists, Schonfeld succeeded in bringing to England several thousand Orthodox Jews, both children and adults (mainly rabbis, teachers, and their families). He raised funds, provided housing, and gained support from the goverment. His rescue work began in 1938 and continued after 1945, when he brought Jewish orphans out of antisemitic Poland. Schonfeld was interested in spiritual as well as physical rescue and his successes affected the profile of British Jewry. Pt. 1 (pp. 1-119) contains a biography of Schonfeld. Pt. 2 (pp. 121-236) contains testimonies on his activities, especially the Kindertransports he organized, by people who were rescued by him or worked with him.

Humanitarian, philanthropist, and campaigner for Jewish emancipation on a grand scale, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) was the preeminent Jewish figure of the nineteenth century - and one of the first truly global celebrities. His story, told here in full for the first time, is a remarkable and illuminating tale of diplomacy and adventure. Abigail Green's sweeping biography follows Montefiore through the realms of court and ghetto, tsar and sultan, synagogue and stock exchange. Interweaving the public triumph of Montefiore's foreign missions with the private tragedy of his childless marriage, this book brings the diversity of nineteenth-century Jewry brilliantly to life - from London to Jerusalem, Rome to St. Petersburg, Morocco to Istanbul. Here we see the origins of Zionism and the rise of international Jewish consciousness, the faltering birth of international human rights, and the making of the modern Middle East. With the globalization and mobilization of religious identities now at the top of the political agenda, Montefiore's life story is relevant as never before. Mining materials from eleven countries in nine languages, Green's masterly biography bridges the East-West divide in modern Jewish history, presenting the transformation of Jewish life in Europe, the Middle East, and the New World as part of a single global phenomenon. As it reestablishes Montefiore's status as a major historical player, it also restores a significant chapter to the history of our modern world.

Celebrating individual men and women who epitomize the courage, fortitude and spirit that enabled Britain and the Allies to triumph in World War II, this book recounts the exploits of more than 100 people - in the fury of battle or alone, and behind the lines. The accompanying photographs show those involved and the contemporary scenes of the episodes described. The author's other books include biographies of Robert Maxwell and Tiny Rowland, and "Klaus Barbie and the Paperclip Conspiracy".

This is the story of Elizabeth I's inner circle and the crucial human relationships which lay at the heart of her personal and political life. Using a wide range of original sources--including private letters, portraits, verse, drama, and state papers--Susan Doran provides a vivid and often dramatic account of political life in Elizabethan England and the queen at its center, offering a deeper insight into Elizabeth's emotional and political conduct--and challenging many of the popular myths that have grown up around her.

When Rachel Johnson was appointed the new editor of the oldest women's weekly magazine in the world, she was facing the challenge of a lifetime. For a start, how do you become an editor when you've never, really, edited? And forget about doubling the circulation in a year at "The Lady"--What on earth do you WEAR to work?

Book by King, Oona

This special book is a compilation of essays on a remarkable but little-known story that lasted over half a century of world-renown physicist, the late Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia Kannegiser. Peierls collected a lot of prestigious awards in his lifetime, and in the beginning of WW2, he and Otto Frisch were responsible for the inception of the Anglo-American nuclear program (1940). He was also one of the key contributors in the research at Los Alamos during those turbulent times. Most previous books on Peierls have focused on his scientific research, while the contents for this volume sheds light on his private life in dramatic circumstances. The extensive contributions were not only gathered from the relatives of Genia, the couple's daughters, Landau's students, and from Russian and English archives, but they also include the unique perspectives of the author who is a professional theoretical physicist and is also fluent in Russian, his native language. So, this fascinating story of love, friendship and physics between Rudolf and Genia is being told for the first time from a surprisingly new angle through correspondence between Genia and Rudolf, memoirs and other documents, interesting and informal excerpts from Peierls' private "diary" covering the years 1979-1994 that will take the reader on a journey through communism, world war, the trials and tribulations of the loving couple with distinctly very different personalities.

This book tells the story of Trinidad-born Claudia Jones, a key figure in the movement for racial justice in Britain. Exiled in 1955 from the US for her affiliation to the Communist Party, she arrived in London penniless and became active in civil rights campaigns among the capital's West Indian communities. She set up the newspaper West Indian Gazette and in 1958, following racist violence in Notting Hill, launched an annual indoor carnival to showcase Caribbean culture. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile was the first book to chart the work of this visionary and pioneer, focusing on her time in Britain. Part of the Radical Black Women series, this new edition features a preface by Black feminist researcher Lola Olufemi and an appendix compiled by Marika Sherwood.

The problems, responsibilities and, ultimately, the meaning of our lives have long been concerns of philosophers, poets, artists - indeed all thinkers, whether their religion informs their opinion or their disbelief challenges conventional wisdom.--Amazon.com.

Joanne Limburg suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: she thinks things she doesn't want to think, and she does things she doesn't want to do. As a small child, she would chew her hair all day and lie awake at night wondering if heaven had a ceiling; a few years later, when she should have been doing her homework, she was pacing her bedroom, agonising about the unfairness of life as a woman, and the shortness of her legs. By the time she was an adult, obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours had come to dominate her life. She knew that something was wrong with her, but it would take many years before she understood what that something was. "The Woman Who Thought Too Much" follows Limburg's quest to understand her predicament and to manage her symptoms, taking the reader with her on a long, twisted journey through consulting rooms, libraries and internet sites, as she seeks to discover all she can about rumination, scrupulosity, avoidance, thought-action fusion, fixed-action patterns, anal fixations, schemas, basal ganglia, tics and synapses. On the way, she encounters competing interpretations of her condition, as offered by psychoanalysts, neuropsychiatrists and cognitive psychologists, and does her best to come to terms with an illness which turns out to be both common, and even - sometimes - treatable. This candid, moving and beautifully written memoir is a sometimes shocking, often sad, and yet also humorous revelation of what it is like to live with so debilitating a condition. It is also an exploration of the inner world of a poet and an intense evocation of the persistence and courage of the human spirit in the face of mental illness.

In the late 1980s, when she began keeping a diary, Edwina Currie was the second most prominent woman in British politics - after Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, she was often spoken of as a potential Prime Minister. Her outspokenness and her lively, media-friendly personality won her a much higher profile than her status as a junior minister would otherwise have commanded. When she was forced to resign from the Government after warning of the danger signs of salmonella infection in eggs, she was already a national figure. The appearance of these diaries is an important publishing event. Like Alan Clark's diaries, they provide a remarkable insight into politics at the top, by a writer with an observant eye and a sharp sense of humour. Edwina Currie's honesty, her frankness and her courage make these unexpurgated diaries an irresistible read. Their revelation of her four-year affair with former Prime Minister John Major has already been a media sensation.

One of England’s foremost filmmakers, Derek Jarman (1942–1994) wrote and directed several feature films, including Sebastiane, Jubilee, Caravaggio, and Blue, as well as numerous short films and music videos. He was a stage designer, artist, writer, gardener, and an outspoken AIDS and queer rights activist in the UK and the United States. He is the author of several books, among them Modern Nature, available from the University of Minnesota Press.

On the surface, David Baddiel's childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family's past, his father's memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother's affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive.