Creator: Bill Paterson
Publication date: 1996-09
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £43.42
Price: £79.64
Review The Railway Man: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Publication date: 2003-09-01
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £9.99
Price: £6.69
Review The Real Heroes of Telemark: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Stop Hitler's Atomic Bomb / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Creator: Kerry Shale
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2002-11
Dewey code: 946
RRP: £11.99
Price: £5.86
Review The Conquest of Mexico / Naxos AudioBooks:
Publication date: 1997-10-24
RRP: £7.99
Price: £6.90
Review Running in the Family / Macmillan Audio Books:
Creator: Diana Quick
Publication date: 1992-10-22
RRP: £10.99
Price: £63.52
Review Twopence to Cross the Mersey: Unabridged / HarperCollins Audio:
Publication date: 1982-12
RRP: £12.93
Price: £14.92
Review From Cave to Cavern: History of Percussion Instruments / Sussex Publications:
Creator: Sue Rodwell
Publication date: 1999-05
RRP: £8.99
Price: £8.99
Review The Sporting Gazette: Sports (Sporting Gazette) / Mr Punch Audio Books:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-06
Dewey code: 782
RRP: £11.99
Price: £0.53
Review The History of Opera (Non Fiction) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: Martin Jarvis
Publication date: 1995-04
Price: £7.49
Review Overture and Beginners 1938-39 / Listen for Pleasure:
Authors
- Eugene D. Genovese
- Eric Foner
RRP: £12.93
Price: £14.92
Review Coming of the Civil War / Sussex Publications:
Authors
- Hugh Seton- Watson
- Hugh Seton-Watson
- Harry Hanak
RRP: £12.93
Price: £14.92
Review Khruschev and Eastern Europe / Sussex Publications:
Authors
- H.G. Nicholas
- William E. Leuchtenburg
RRP: £12.93
Price: £14.92
Review New Deal / Sussex Publications:
Creator: Lindsay Duncan
Publication date: 2001-06-07
RRP: £12.99
Price: £9.99
Review Marie Antoinette (Tape) / Orion:Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser's first book in five years, heralds the welcome return of her wonderfully lucid, engaging style as she disentangles myth from fact regarding the life of the still controversial, and misunderstood, wife of Louis XVI of France. It is also perhaps her most assured work to date. The daughter of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette, or l'Autrichienne, was sent to France to marry the Dauphin in 1770 in an act of political union between the two countries. Despite her husband's preference for the hunting field over the bedroom, and a somewhat inexpressive personality-his final terse diary entry was to be, appropriately, "Rien"-a decade of French courtly exuberance entailed. Her disappointment in marriage gave way to an enjoyment of her position, especially on turning 30, yet an increasing number of libelles and scandalous rumours about the new Queen and her sexual proclivities grew from Versailles' whispers to the shouts of what was to be the revolution of 1789. This was followed by her own awful demise and beheading four wretched years later, after the appalling torture of her own young son falsely testifying that he had been sexually abused by her. Those are the skeletal facts of her life, but Fraser fleshes out the story with her customary composed authority. Her stated ambition is twofold. The book's subtitle, "The Journey", refers to Marie Antoinette's political significance in a union over which she had no control, but also her own personal story, from the ill-educated, overwhelmed teenage bride to the despised monarch who bore the brunt of all the ills of the ancien régime. Fraser, arch debunker, necessarily removes the apocryphal-Mozart the child prodigy saying that he would marry her, the infamous "let them eat cake" comment that preceded her by several hundred years, dressing as a milkmaid at her model village in the grounds of Versailles-to reveal a woman whose misfortunes, she concludes, outweighed her failures. [+]Like the Jemima Shore detective novels she also pens, Fraser displays an unerring ability to ask the right questions. Most of all, though, she writes with an understated, unadorned clarity that imparts her learning with an ease to be both envied and savoured. In 1789, Marie Antoinette famously said to a deputation from the Commune of Paris, "I've seen everything, known everything, and forgotten everything". There could be no wiser, compassionate and judicious reclaimer of her besmirched reputation than Antonia Fraser. -David Vincent.
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1992-11-30
Dewey code: 976
RRP: £9.99
Price: £11.98
Review Sugar Country: Sugar Industry in the United States, 1753-1950 (Classics in Southern History Series) / University of South Carolina Press:
Publication date: 1996-10-31
RRP: £4.99
Price: £4.95
Review Poachers' Tales / David & Charles Audiobooks:
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2001-11-29
Price: £13.00
Review My East End / Penguin Audiobooks:The heart of the East End has always been Tower Hamlets; Gilda O'Neill is enough of a partisan to regard even Hackney as a bit out of bounds. My East End starts with the earliest times-the East of London has always been where dirty industry congregated, downstream from the Court and Parliament, and it has always been where incomers started, from Flemings in the Middle Ages to Bengalis today. The greater part of this excellent book, though, is not a competent academic run through of the sources, but an invaluable collection of oral history, in which pensioners talk about the classic East End of late Victorian times and the inter-war period, a time when grinding poverty could just about be survived with luck, when people were forced to live in each other's pockets and children played around the open door of their homes until all hours: "There was always a jigsaw on the go and everyone that called had a go at putting some pieces in. Nanny usually came round on Friday nights and always brought a bag of sweets-winter warmers-and, as she was going home, she would call out 'Goodnight, kidlets'. I said that when I grew up I would go out singing in the streets and buy her a pair of blue bloomers. " O'Neill is fascinating about both the positive and negative sides of a way of life that went forever when families were moved out to housing estates on the fringes of London and about the parts of it that have survived into a new multi-cultural East End; My East End is a good book because it has an unsnobbish respect for the voices it draws on. -Roz Kaveney.
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2008-01-02
RRP: £45.82
Price: £47.81
Review No Place for Ladies / Oakhill Publishing Limited:
Authors
- Eric Jones
- Michael Havinden
RRP: £12.93
Price: £12.93
Review World Development and Europe's Long-Term Rise / Sussex Publications:
Creator: Martin Jarvis
Publication date: 1995-04
Price: £46.99
Review The History of World War Two / Listen for Pleasure:
Publication date: 2003-10-03
RRP: £19.99
Price: £4.88
Review The Isles / Macmillan Audio Books:When did British history begin, and where will it all end? These controversial issues are tackled head-on in Norman Davies' polemical and persuasive survey of the four countries that in modern times have become known as the British Isles. Covering 10 millennia in just over a thousand pages, from "Cheddar Man" to New Labour, Davies shows how relatively recent was the formation of the English state-no earlier than Tudor times-and shows too how a sense of Britishness only emerged with the coming of empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. A historian of Poland and the author of an acclaimed history of Europe, Davies is especially sensitive to the complex mixing and merging of tribes and races, languages and traditions, conquerors and colonised which has gone on throughout British history and which in many ways makes "our island story" much more like that of the rest of Europe than we usually think. Many myths of the English are dispelled in this book and many historians are taken to task for their blinkered Anglo-centrism. But the book ends on an upbeat note, with Davies welcoming Britain's return to the heart of Europe at the dawn of the new millennium. -Miles Taylor.
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Models & Brands:
The Railway Man: Complete & Unabridged, The Real Heroes of Telemark: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Stop Hitler's Atomic Bomb, The Conquest of Mexico, Running in the Family, Twopence to Cross the Mersey: Unabridged, From Cave to Cavern: History of Percussion Instruments, The Sporting Gazette: Sports (Sporting Gazette), The History of Opera (Non Fiction), Overture and Beginners 1938-39, Coming of the Civil War, Khruschev and Eastern Europe, New Deal, Marie Antoinette (Tape), Sugar Country: Sugar Industry in the United States, 1753-1950 (Classics in Southern History Series), Poachers' Tales, My East End, No Place for Ladies, World Development and Europe's Long-Term Rise, The History of World War Two, The Isles |
