Ebooks de historia, página 96 de 2229

Prior to the First World War T.E. Hulme was one of the most original and striking creative personalities in England, strongly admired by both Pound and Eliot. Yet he died in 1917, virtually unknown. A key figure in the genesis of Modernism, Hulme mixed among a great range of gifted artists and was never shy of courting controversy. Unusually among poets of his generation, he was convinced of the rightness of Britains role in the war (and criticised Bertrand Russell for his pacifism.) Robert Ferguson offers the first modern biography of Hulme, drawing upon access to Hulmes papers and later interviews with his associates.A humane, comprehensive biography... By the end, Fergusons final judgment of his subject - the conservative character at its best - seems justified. Jeremy Noel-Todd, Observer

Victor Gollancz was a teacher, publisher, author and campaigner who spent his life passionately trying to make people see the truth as he saw it. If its as a publisher that he is remembered above all, nonetheless in many ways he epitomised the social conscience of the mid-twentieth century: he founded the Left Book Club, Save Europe Now and the Campaign Against Capital Punishment. For this biography, first published in 1987, Ruth Dudley Edwards had access to all the Gollancz family and firm papers, and produced an honest, searching work which not only reveals an extraordinary man but throws light on many of the political and social events of his times.Frequently gripping and always readable. John Gross, ObserverConsistently enthralling and a brilliant achievement. Hilary Rubinstein, SpectatorOne of the fullest and richest portraits of a contemporary individual we have had. Anthony Curtis, Financial TimesI would trust anyones life to Ruth Dudley Edwards. Terence De Vere White, Irish Times

In The Fifth Monarchy Men (Faber, 1972), Professor Capp places the movement in the context of the rise of millenarian thought in Europe from the Reformation and its rapid spread in England during the Civil Wars. For many radicals, the execution of King Charles cleared the way for King Jesus, and heralded the establishment of a revolutionary millennium. The apparent apostasy of the Rump Parliament and Oliver Cromwell channelled part of the wave of millenarian feeling into the formation of a specific sect. This first comprehensive study of the Fifth Monarchists movement traces its history and examines its social, political, legal and religious proposals. Although it had the support of some gentry and army officers, it was essentially an urban movement of artisans, apprentices, and even labourers, reaching lower down the social scale than any contemporary radical movement, with the possible exception of the Diggers. Professor Capp discusses its structure, and its relationship to other revolutionary sects, notably the Levellers and Quakers. He analyses the social, political and economic programmes of the self-styled saints which, though revolutionary, were elitist rather than equalitarian. The Fifth Monarchists militant foreign policy was shaped by the twofold consideration of exporting the revolution and of strengthening the position of English trade. Their much-derided call for the re-establishment of the Mosaic Code is the culmination of a long tradition of such thinking amongst Puritan and earlier writers. Appendices provide biographies of almost 280 Fifth Monarchists and the location of all known Fifth Monarchist groups.

Based on unrestricted access to private papers, Grand Dukes and Diamonds charts the history of one of the most influential and extraordinary families of our time: the Wernhers of Luton Hoo. The familys fortune was made by Sir Julius Wernher, financier, mining magnate, and one of the creators of modern South Africa. Luton Hoo, a country house in Bedfordshire, became the site of Wernhers magnificent collection and was duly inherited by Sir Harold Wernher and his wife Lady Zia, daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia and a direct descendant of Pushkin. At Luton Hoo the couple displayed her priceless collection of Faberge, and together they ran a racing stud at Newmarket. Three of their racehorses, Brown Jack, Meld and Charlottown, became legends in their time. Sir Harold also played a crucial role at D-Day, the story of which has its definitive telling within Raleigh Trevelyans fascinating narrative.

Epic and engrossing, this extravagant true story covers 200 years in the life of an English family dynasty in Sicily. Benjamin Ingham, possibly the greatest tycoon England has ever known, was attracted to Sicily from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire by the burgeoning trade in marsala wine. This is the story of the English Croesus, who made the money, and his beneficiaries, the Whitaker family, who spent it - intertwined with two hundred years of enthralling Sicilian history.Most entertaining and readable. Anthony Powell, TelegraphDeeply researched and wholly fascinating. Washington PostAn original and entertaining contribution to Anglo-Italian history. Times

Without exaggeration this can be said to be two books in one: it is both a biography of Harold Nicolsons father and a history of British diplomacy from the late nineteenth-century until the middle of the First World War. Described as the quintessential diplomat Sir Arthurs various postings took in Berlin, Peking, Athens, Teheran, Budapest, Constantinople, Madrid and St Petersburg. During his career his instincts mutated from pro-German and hating France and Russia, into a stage of wanting to make friends with those two countries and hating Germany. Harold Nicolson has an interesting and brave hypothesis regarding the First World War making a distinction between its origin and its causes. Regarding the former, in the words of his biographer James Lees-Milne, Harold maintained that from the years 1900 to 1914 we, compared to the Germans, had a clean sheet, whereas regarding the latter, say from the year 1500 to 1900 our sheet was very black indeed. Our Elizabethans behaved worse than the Kaisers imperialists. And when the Kaisers imperialists in the last two decades of the nineteenth-century developed predatory instincts in Africa, they met from us pained and patronising surprise. Harold with justice and a good deal of courage blamed Great Britain for the causes and Germany for the origin of the great conflict.Harold Nicolson always considered this to be his best book and its universally favourable reception supports that with the Times Literary Supplement observing that as a biography it was composed in the new intimate fashion introduced by Lytton Strachey. As has been said though, it was more than a biography, it was a history, and a most fascinating one, of the period leading up to the Great War.

Arnold Bennett was born in a street called Hope Street. A street less hopeful it would be hard to imagine. Thus begins Margaret Drabbles biography of a man whose most famous achievement was to re-create, in such novels as The Old Wives Taleand Clayhanger, the life, atmosphere and character of the Five Towns region in which he was born and grew up.Arnold Bennett is a very personal book. What interests me, writes the author, is Bennetts background, his childhood and origins, for they are very similar to my own. My mothers family came from the Potteries, and the Bennett novels seem to me to portray a way of life that still existed when I was a child, and indeed persists in certain areas. So like all books this has been partly an act of self-exploration.Of Bennett as a writer Drabble says The best books I think are very fine indeed, on the highest level, deeply moving, original and dealing with material that I had never before encountered in fiction, but only in life: I feel they have been underrated, and my response to them is so constant, even after years of work on them and constant re-readings, that I want to communicate enthusiasm.Of Bennett as a man she paints an affectionate portrait, not glossing over the irritability, dyspepsia and rigidity which at times made him so difficult a companion but reminding us too of his honesty, kindliness and sensitivity. Many a time, she writes at the end of the book, re-reading a novel, reading a letter or a piece of his Journal, I have wanted to shake his hand, or to thank him, to say well done. I have written this instead.

Peter Hain has always spoken his mind. So he does in this book. Here he tells his story as an outsider turned insider: anti-apartheid militant to Cabinet minister, serving twelve years in Labours government between May 1997 and May 2010. Growing up as the son of courageous anti-apartheid South Africans, Peter Hain was first in the public eye aged fifteen, reading at the funeral of an anti-apartheid friend hanged in Pretoria. Living in exile in Britain during his late teens, he led campaigns to disrupt whites-only South African sports tours. His political notoriety resulted in two extraordinary Old Bailey trials and a letter bomb. Hain recalls his role in negotiating the historic 2007 settlement in Northern Ireland, being Britains first-ever African born Africa Minister, and acting as a passionate advocate and deliverer of devolved government to Wales. Featuring Iraq, Mugabe, Europe, Gibraltar, blood diamonds, work alongside MI5 and MI6, and the delivery of justice for workers robbed of their pensions and compensation for sick miners, Hains autobiography gives a fascinating insight into life near the top of the Blair and Brown governments.

Do you remember washing in a tin bath by the fire, using outside lavatories and not having a television? Did you grow up in the 1950s and were you a teenager in the swinging sixties? If the Festival of Britain, food rationing and the Queens coronation are among your earliest memories then you belong to the post-war baby boomer generation.How did we end up here, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when it all just seems like yesterday?In this fascinating new trip down memory lane, Paul Feeney remembers what it has been like to live through the eventful second half of the twentieth century. This nostalgic journey through an era of change will resonate with anyone who began their innocent childhood years in austerity and has lived through a lifetime of ground-breaking events to the much changed Britain of today. There are also some wonderful pictures to help jog our memories of bygone days.

Starting with the dawn of what we would recognise as modern human thought, this book journeys through 35,000 years of our human past. It shows how our earliest ancestors learnt to enter trance states and the revolutionary effect this had on the way they interacted with their world. Moreover, by marrying the very latest research with vivid first-person reconstructions, the book will actually take readers back in time. In its pages we join Stone Age hunting parties, steal food from desperate, starving cannibals, sit eye-to-eye with a mouldy Bronze Age mummy and join the Celts for a feast where you truly are what you eat. The story of our past has never been told this way before and has never been brought to life with such vividness. This is the past as our ancestors would have known it.

Technically this book is a masterly achievement: the collection, sorting, selecting and balancing of material has meant an immense amount of hard and highly skilful work. The presentation is not only learned but cool, objective, unimpassioned and yet almost always alive and compassionate as well . . . As a reference book alone it is immensely valuable . . . As an example of a humane, scholarly, expert history, Professor Becketts book will be difficult to surpass. D. B. Quinn, Belfast Telegraph[He] has brilliantly succeeded. The book is admirably constructed and written with clarity and economy which carry the narrative unflaggingly through to the end . . . This excellent book supersedes all previous histories of modern Ireland. F. S. L. Lyons, New Statesman

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 with the aim of researching the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. One of its best-loved publications is The Pub and the People (1943), a unique study of one of Britains best-loved pastimes, describing how people behaved in pubs, what and how much they drank, and the decor and layout of the average pre-war alehouse. Alongside sociological interest it offers amusing insights into an era when supping pints was only for the roughest customers, and beer was considered helpful not only to general health (There is no bad ale, so Grandma said) but also (contra the porter in Macbeth) to the act of love.The authors of this book have unearthed much curious information. George Orwell, ListenerAnyone with an interest in the history of beer and pubs in Britain ought to read it.Boak and Baileys Beer Blog

American incomprehension of the outside world has been the chief problem in international affairs since the end of World War II. In America and the Imperialism of Ignorance, veteran political journalist Andrew Alexander constructs a meticulous case, including evidence gleaned from the steady opening up of Soviet archives, demonstrating why this is so. From starting the Cold War to revisiting unlearned lessons upon Cuba and Vietnam, the Middle East has latterly become the arena in which the American foreign policy approach proved wretchedly consistent. This has created six decades in which war was not the last resort of diplomacy but an early option, and where peace and order breaking out was thought to be the natural conclusion of military intervention. Alexander traces this shoot-first tendency from 1945, arguing that on a grand scale the Cold War was a red herring in which the US and her proxies set out to counter a Soviet expansionism that never truly existed, and that by the time of the George W Bush era, the Industrial-Military-Complex was in office offering little hope of a change in approach.

Unfinished Adventure, published in 1933, is Evelyn Sharps autobiography. It is a remarkable book recounting a remarkable life. Born in 1869, Evelyn Sharp was the sister of the folk song and dance expert, Cecil Sharp. A journalist, writer, pacifist and suffragist, Evelyn Sharp writes vividly about all aspects of her life: her school-days, Paris in 1890 , the Yellow Book, the Manchester Guardian, her conversion to Suffragism, her imprisonment in Holloway, her war work, her relief work in Germany and Russia in the nineteen-twenties, and finally, in her own words, The Greatest of All Adventures: the day she completed this book she married the campaigning writer and journalist, H. W. Nevinson.A. S. Byatt has described Evelyn Sharp as perspicacious, witty and a very good writer. Evelyn Sharp and her autobiography deserve to be better knownFaber Finds is very pleased to be reissuing An Unfinished Adventure at the same time as the Manchester University Press publish Angela Johns biography, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955

The Gardeners of Salonika as Clemenceau contemptuously labelled them, could well be called the forgotten army of the First World War. Yet the Macedonian Campaign was, in Lord Hankeys words, the most controversial of all the so-called sideshows. In his definitive The First World War (1999) Sir John Keegan hailed Alan Palmer for having written the best study of the Macedonian Front in English. Palmer tells the story of this extraordinary polyglot army (it included, at various times, contingents from seven countries) from the first landing at Salonika in 1915 to the peace in 1918. He also illuminates the political and strategic background: the ceaseless argument in London and Paris over the armys future and the maze of Greek politics within which it and its commanders were enclosed. A masterly and colourful account of this, the most controversial and neglected sideshow of them all.GuardianNot only a valuable contribution to history, but also an enthralling bookSunday Times

Michael Foots two-volume biography of Aneurin Nye Bevan (1897-1960) - arguably Britains greatest socialist, indelibly associated with the founding of the National Health Service - is one of the major political biographies of the last century. It is the life of an inspirational politician, written by one who knew and unabashedly admired him. Volume II, first published in 1973, begins with Bevans role in the founding of a comprehensive National Health Service - this while he was also tasked with addressing the countrys severe post-war housing shortage. It takes in his 1951 resignation from the cabinet in protest at the introduction of prescription charges, and his subsequent leadership of a Bevanite Labour left; his publication in 1952 of In Place of Fear; his service as Shadow Foreign Secretary during the Suez crisis in 1956; his controversial reversal of opposition to nuclear weapons in 1957; and his death from cancer in 1960.

In the second volume of his celebrated history of the Hundred Years War, Jonathan Sumption examines the middle years of the fourteenth century and the succession of crises that threatened French affairs of state, including defeat at Poitiers and the capture of the king.

Michael Foots two-volume biography of Aneurin Nye Bevan (1897-1960) - arguably Britains greatest socialist, indelibly associated with the founding of the National Health Service, - is one of the major political biographies of the last century. It is the life of an inspirational politician, written by one who knew and unabashedly admired him. Volume I, first published in 1962, describes Bevans life from his birth in Tredegar in the South Wales Valleys, through his abortive schooling, his employment at a colliery and the subsequent embrace of socialism that would make him a leader among South Wales miners. It follows his path to the House of Commons as a Labour MP with a fast-rising reputation as a defender of the working class; and his marriage in 1934 to fellow firebrand MP Jennie Lee. The volume closes with Labours landslide election victory of 1945, and Bevans appointment as Minister of Health.

War in the Wilderness is the most comprehensive account ever published of the human aspects of the Chindit war in Burma.The word Chindit will always have a special resonance in military circles. Every Chindit endured what is widely regarded as the toughest sustained Allied combat experience of the Second World War. The Chindit expeditions behind Japanese lines in occupied Burma 19431944 transformed the morale of British forces after the crushing defeats of 1942. The Chindits provided the springboard for the Allies later offensives.The two expeditions extended the boundaries of human endurance. The Chindits suffered slow starvation and exposure to dysentery, malaria, typhus and a catalogue of other diseases. They endured the intense mental strain of living and fighting under the jungle canopy, with the ever-present threat of ambush or simply bumping the enemy. Every Chindit carried his kit and weapons (equivalent to two heavy suitcases) in the tropical heat and humidity. A disabling wound or sickness frequently meant a lonely death. Those who could no longer march were often left behind with virtually no hope of survival. Some severely wounded were shot or given a lethal dose of morphia to ensure they would not be captured alive by the Japanese.Fifty veterans of the Chindit expeditions kindly gave interviews for this book. Many remarked on the self-reliance that sprang from living and fighting as a Chindit. Whatever happened to them after their experiences in Burma, they knew that nothing else would ever be as bad. There are first-hand accounts of the bitter and costly battles and the final, wasteful weeks, when men were forced to continue fighting long after their health and strength had collapsed. War in the Wilderness continues the story as the survivors returned to civilian life. They remained Chindits for the rest of their days, members of a brotherhood forged in extreme adversity.

Son of the eccentric Adolphus, seventh and favourite son of George III, Prince George was born in 1819 and was briefly heir presumptive to the throne of England until the birth that same year of his cousin Victoria. Instead he became George, second Duke of Cambridge, and rose to be Commander-in-Chief of the Army aged 37, holding that position for 39 years. Often considered a hidebound reactionary, he nonetheless took a keen interest in reform of the Army, and made considerable efforts to improve the soldiers lot. In the year that the title of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was bestowed by HRH the Queen upon Prince William and Catherine Middleton on the morning of their wedding, this charming, substantial and formidably researched life of The Royal George has a renewed topicality.