In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction. Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city’s riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar “echoic” quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.London confirms Ackroyd’s status as what one critic has called “our age’s greatest London imagination.”

    Ultimately, they were the only Jewish children of the town to survive the Holocaust.A Guest in My Own Country recalls the life of one of Eastern Europe's most accomplished modern writers, beginning with his survival during the final months of the war. Konrad captures the dangers, the hopes, the betrayals and courageous acts of the period through a series of carefully chosen episodes that occasionally border on the surreal (as when a dead German soldier begins to speak, attempting to justify his actions).The end of the war launches the young man on a remarkable career in letters and politics. Offering lively descriptions of both his private and public life in Budapest, New York, and Berlin, Konrad reflects insightfully on his role in the Hungarian Uprising, the notion of "internal emigration" – the fate of many writers who, like Konrad, refused to leave the Eastern Bloc under socialism – and other complexities of European identity. To read A Guest in My Own Country is to experience the recent history of East-Central Europe from the inside.

    NBC News calls it, "A historical document of major significance." The focus is on Sir William Stephenson, Britain's urbane spy chief who inspired James Bond.

    Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a 'Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the 'special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies.Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, 'Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, including the revolt of October 1944.It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale - but, as a member of a 'Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    Five days after Hitler marches Eric and his parents flee for their lives. His mother hides out in Italy, taking her son deeper and deeper into the mountains to avoid capture. This book tells his story.

     'One of the great biographies of 2015.' The Times Fully updated edition including recently released information. A Guardian Book of the Year. The Times Best Biography of the Year. Mail on Sunday Biography of the Year. Daily Mail Biography of Year. Spectator Book of the Year. BBC History Book of the Year. 'A remarkable and definitive portrait ' Frederick Forsyth 'Andrew Lownie's biography of Guy Burgess, Stalin's Englishman ... shrewd, thorough, revelatory.' William Boyd 'In the sad and funny Stalin's Englishman, [Lownie] manages to convey the charm as well as the turpitude.' Craig Brown Guy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.In this first full biography, Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess's chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration and betrayal of the British Intelligence Service. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years.Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin's Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colourful, tragi-comic wonder.

    Prime Minister Tony Blair — young, charismatic and complex — shaped the nation profoundly in the ten years that followed. From his work in Northern Ireland to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, few of his decisions were free from scrutiny and debate. Alternately beloved and reviled, he was an international figure to a degree matched by few British leaders — a role he continues in to this day through the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and his work in the Middle East. Now, for the first time, we see the fascinating journey and difficult choices of the prime minister through his own eyes. Grippingly candid and deeply intimate, A Journey is a must-read political memoir, full of startling insights into a host of world leaders, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. It is also a book that delves deeply and profoundly into what it means to be in a position of great power today, and its emotional and personal toll.

    This book reveals how author Roald Dahl was a member of Churchill's infamous dirty tricks squad.

    An important and fascinating firsthand account of life with Hitler from 1942 until his death in the Berlin bunker in 1945, by the young woman who was his last secretary.

    The smallest of the extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II, Sobibor was where now-retired auto worker John Demjanjuk has been accused of working as a prison guard. Sobibor also was the scene of the war's biggest prisoner escape.   Richard Rashke's interviews with eighteen of  those who survived provide the foundation for this volume. He also draws on books, articles, and diaries to make vivid the camp, the uprising, and the escape. In the afterword, Rashke relates how the Polish government in October 1993, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the escape and how it has beautified the site since a film based on his book appeared on Polish television.

    Juan Pujol was a nobody, a Barcelona poultry farmer determined to oppose the Nazis. Using only his gift for daring falsehoods, Pujol became Germany’s most valued agent — or double agent: it took four tries before the British believed he was really on the Allies’ side.In the guise of Garbo, Pujol turned in a masterpiece of deception worthy of his big-screen namesake. He created an imaginary million-man army, invented armadas out of thin air, and brought a vast network of fictional subagents whirring to life. His unwitting German handlers believed every word, and banked on Garbo’s lies as their only source of espionage within Great Britain.For his greatest performance, Pujol had to convince the German High Command that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was a feint and the real attack was aimed at Calais. The Nazis bought it, turning the tide of battle at the crucial moment.Based on years of archival research and interviews with Pujol’s family, Agent Garbo is a true-life thriller set in the shadow world of espionage and deception.

    In 1942 a young Frenchwoman living in Somerset with her three little girls answered a broadcast appeal for holiday photographs to be sent to the War Office. She was invited to London for an interview, and a startling proposition was put to her. Reluctantly she accepted it. In a few months she had been trained as a British agent and, under the name "Céline", infiltrated into Southern France. Her run there was short but lively. She worked with the Resistance Movement, organising sabotage and the reception of parachuted agents and supplies. After six months the Germans arrested her with her Commanding Officer, known as "Raoul". So began her long ordeal in prison and concentration-camp. The Gestapo put certain questions to her; she had nothing to say, even after they had pulled out all her toenails. But her replies on other matters were such as to draw suspicion from her Commanding Officer to herself. The Gestapo condemned her to death, but did not kill her. After a year in a Parisian prison she was moved to the infamous concentration-camp for women at Ravensbrück. There she was buried for three months in total darkness, and witnessed the mass execution of her fellow-prisoners in the spring of 1945. To save his skin, the Camp Commandant took her with him to meet the advancing Americans. So Odette Sanson lived to receive the George Cross, the highest British decoration for gallantry that can be awarded to a woman. She also holds the M.B.E. and the French Légion d'Honneur. In 1947 she became the wife of her 'chief', Captain Peter Churchill, D.S.O., M.C.Jerrard Tickell - the distinguished author of such widely popular novels as Appointment with Venus, Soldier from the Wars Returning and The Hero of Saint Roger - has told Odette's story with practised skill. His description of her last two years is particularly impressive for its attempt to suggest how a woman who had no hope to escape death could yet preserve her mind in peace. Odette has been filmed with Anna Neagle in the title-role.

    From 1948-54, he published six volumes of memoirs. They secured his reputation and shaped our understanding of the conflict to this day. Drawing on the drafts of Churchill's manuscript as well as his correspondence from the period, David Reynolds masterfully reveals Churchill the author. Reynolds shows how the memoirs were censored by the British government to conceal state secrets, and how Churchill himself censored them to avoid offending current world leaders. This book illuminates an unjustly neglected period of Churchill's life-the Second Wilderness Years of 1945-51, when Churchill wrote himself into history, politicked himself back into the prime-ministership, and delivered some of the most important speeches of his career.

    Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy was one of the best-selling novelists of her day; beautiful Diana married the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; and Unity , a close friend of Hitler, shot herself in the head when England and Germany declared war.

    In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed its harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before emigrating to New York. This sweeping account of one family’s escape from the turmoil of war-torn Europe hangs upon the intimate and deeply personal story of Maitland’s mother’s passionate romance with a Catholic Frenchman. Separated by war and her family’s disapproval, the young lovers—Janine and Roland—lose each other for fifty years. It is a testimony to both Maitland’s investigative skills and her devotion to her mother that she successfully traced the lost Roland and was able to reunite him with Janine. Unlike so many stories of love during wartime, theirs has a happy ending.