Publication date: 2008-06-17
Dewey code: 945
RRP: £20.00
Price: £11.03
Review Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler / Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.:
Creator: B. A. Windeatt
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-02-27
Dewey code: 248.220924
RRP: £4.99
Price: £3.82
Review The Book of Margery Kempe (Penguin Classics) / Penguin:
Publication date: 2008-05-05
Dewey code: 968
RRP: £12.99
Price: £6.49
Review Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal / Blake Publishing:
Edition: Reissue
Publication date: 2008-03
Dewey code: 823.91
RRP: £10.22
Price: £6.18
Review Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn / Sourcebooks Landmark:
Edition: export ed
Publication date: 2005-02-23
Dewey code: 973.917092
RRP: £12.99
Price: £12.99
Review Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom / PublicAffairs,U.S.:
Publication date: 2007-11-29
RRP: £20.00
Price: £11.51
Review Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work / Ebury Press:
Authors
- Richard Appignanesi
- Oscar Zarate
Dewey code: 609
RRP: £6.11
Price: £3.78
Review Freud for Beginners / Pantheon Books:
Publication date: 2006-08-04
Dewey code: 959.3044092
RRP: £22.50
Price: £17.38
Review The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej / Yale University Press:
Publication date: 2008-05-01
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.82
Review Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm / Penguin:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2001-08-17
Dewey code: 940.548173
RRP: £12.99
Price: £5.08
Review Slightly Out of Focus (Modern Library) / Modern Library Inc:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-09-06
Dewey code: 324
RRP: £10.00
Price: £5.49
Review Gladstone / Pan Books:
Creator: Tony Benn
Publication date: 2003-10-07
Dewey code: 941
RRP: £7.00
Price: £3.71
Review The Benn Tapes 1 (Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-12-30
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.04
Review The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-45 / Phoenix:The last live broadcast on Polish Radio, on September 23, 1939, was Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp Minor, played by a young pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman, until his playing was interrupted by German shelling. It was the same piece, and the same pianist, when broadcasting resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years in between, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse. Szpilman's family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him. This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. Ironically, it was a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved Szpilman's life by bringing food and an eiderdown to the derelict ruin where he discovered him. Hosenfeld died seven years later in a Stalingrad labour camp, but portions of his diary, reprinted here, tell of his outraged incomprehension of the madness and evil he witnessed, thereby establishing an effective counterpoint to ground the nightmarish vision of the pianist in a desperate reality. Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin's Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis. [+]In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase. This admirably robust translation by Anthea Bell is the first in the English language. There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were 240,000. Wladyslaw Szpilman's extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millions who lost their lives. -David Vincent.
Publication date: 2005-02-24
Dewey code: 947.0738092
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.18
Review The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Penguin 20th century classics) / Penguin Classics:
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2002-02
Dewey code: 973.40922
RRP: £10.22
Price: £5.03
Review Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation / Vintage Books USA:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2004-06-03
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £10.99
Price: £5.98
Review Catherine the Great and Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair / Phoenix:For most of the 20th century Grigory Potemkin has existed as no more than an entertaining side-show for Russian historians. And make no mistake-he is very entertaining; in the Russian royal court of Catherine the Great that was noted for its sexual promiscuity, Potemkin stood out as the libertine par excellence. Although his affair with Catherine only lasted a couple of years, after which he moved on to a succession of nieces and became Catherine's procurer-in-chief, Potemkin remained the love of her life and remained a powerful figure at court. In his new doorstop of a biography, Simon Sebag-Montefiore aims to show that Potemkin is much more than a historical divertissement and is instead one of the central figures of political influence in 18th-century Russia-and by and large he succeeds. Sebag-Montefiore refutes the image of the paper tiger who erected cardboard villages along the banks of Dnieper to convince Catherine that the colonisation of the Ukraine was continuing apace, and instead credits him as the architect for the cities of Odessa and Sebastapol that emerged out of his Great Plan to secure the Crimea-and hence a southern coastline-for Russia. At times, one feels that perhaps Sebag-Montefiore doth protest too much and that he pushes his claims for Potemkin too far. But this is more than compensated for by his enthusiasm. Many historians these days write with a jaded eye, looking to debunk popular heroes; Sebag-Montefiore aims to do the opposite and he has combined his journalist's eye for a good story with an academic's attention to research and detail to create a highly readable biography which is accessible even to those who know little of the period. -John Crace.
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1995-05-09
Dewey code: 323
RRP: £8.99
Price: £5.12
Review Life and Death in Shanghai / Flamingo:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2001-09-03
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £11.99
Price: £3.44
Review Queen Victoria: A Personal History / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:Heir to the throne at the age of 11, queen at 18, mothering her own heirs at 21, and both a widow and a grandmother by the time she was 42, Queen Victoria's was an extraordinary life, even for a British monarch. Centuries collided in her life and times. She was a quaint survival of a medieval age-preserving the dynasty by marrying off her children and observing court ritual to the letter. But she was a thoroughly modern monarch too-she loved rail travel at high speed, had an unusually insouciant attitude towards religion, and despite her reputation for not being amused, she was, at least until Prince Albert's death, a woman to whom gaiety and mischief came naturally. Christopher Hibbert, the biographer and popular historian, has already produced a selection from Victoria's journals and letters. Now he has written a full biography, which is a light and enjoyable tour through a familiar landscape. But with 66 chapters in 500 pages there is not much space for depth. The world beyond Victoria's court and family life does not feature very much. And on the outstanding questions of her reign-for example, her relationship with John Brown, her unrealistic sense of her own constitutional position, or the remaking of the image of the monarchy which took place after 1870-the author's verdict is either missing or inconclusive. -Miles Taylor.
Publication date: 2008-07-07
RRP: £25.00
Price: £14.91
Review Hadrian: Empire and Conflict / British Museum Press:
Creator: Harry Zohn
Publication date: 1964-06-15
Dewey code: 838.91209
RRP: £13.99
Price: £10.29
Review The World of Yesterday / University of Nebraska Press:
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Models & Brands:
Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler, The Book of Margery Kempe (Penguin Classics), Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal, Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work, Freud for Beginners, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm, Slightly Out of Focus (Modern Library), Gladstone, The Benn Tapes 1 (Radio Collection), The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-45, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Penguin 20th century classics), Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Catherine the Great and Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair, Life and Death in Shanghai, Queen Victoria: A Personal History, Hadrian: Empire and Conflict, The World of Yesterday |
