Clever, urbane and handsome, Charles presided over a hedonistic court, in which licence and licentiousness prevailed.Mistresses is the story of the women who shared Charles's bed, each of whom wielded influence on both the politics and cultural life of the country. From the young king-in-exile's first mistress and mother to his first child, Lucy Walter, to the promiscuous and ill-tempered courtier, Barbara Villiers. From Frances Teresa Stuart, 'the prettiest girl in the world' to history's most famous orange-seller, 'pretty, witty' Nell Gwynn and to her fellow-actress, Moll Davis, who bore the last of the king's fifteen illegitimate children. From Louise de Keroualle, the French aristocrat - and spy for Louis XIV - to the sexually ambiguous Hortense Mancini. Here, too, is the forlorn and humiliated Queen Catherine, the Portuguese princess who was Charles's childless queen.Drawing on a wide variety of original sources, including material in private archives, Linda Porter paints a vivid picture of these women and of Restoration England, an era that was both glamorous and sordid.

    Chris, best known for his reporting on wars around the world, takes us back to his childhood in his father's universe of Southern intellectuals and backwoods rednecks, of night-fighter pilots in the Pacific, poets in Paris, and martini-drinking ad men in Atlanta. And to the summer of 1971, when James Dickey's first novel, "Deliverance", was made into a movie.That tale of soft suburbanites forced to kill or be killed along the rushing white waters of a wild Georgia river was a huge success, and Jim Dickey, who played the sheriff in the movie, became an instant star. But it was also in that summer that the long, slow process of destruction-- of himself and of his family-- became clear. Poetry gave way to performance, and genius faded behind an alcoholic haze. Jim Dickey's world shrank to Columbia, South Carolina, where he taught at the university. His friends drifted, or were driven, away. So too his sons.For nearly twenty years after his mother drank herself to death in 1976, Christopher hardly saw his father. When they met, it was in passing and on neutral territory-- at a coffee shop at La Guardia Airport, at the university's faculty club. Always, Jim would be drunk. Chris had heard accounts of the horrors in his father's house: an alcoholic second wife, a little daughter forced to rely on her wits and will to survive. But Chris believed that there was nothing he could do about the decisions his father made.Then, in the summer of 1994, pushed by his own wife, Chris went back to South Carolina, back to his mother's grave. He steeled himself against all the madness he knew still lingered there, but hoped that by reuniting with his father he would find what was missing in himself. He discovered he had been right about the horrors of his father's life, but he also found a blood tie that could not be broken, a need for kinship that had to be satisfied. A few months later, as Jim Dickey lay in a hospital near death with liver disease, Chris and his brother, Kevin, and the thirteen-year-old sister they barely knew entered into a conspiracy to save him. And they succeeded.During the last two years of his life, Jim Dickey was physically shrunken and short of breath, but sober. He spoke, as he had not for years, with consistent, dazzling lucidity. He turned his depleting energy to his poetry and breathed new life into it. His wife, who had fought her own terrible battle with depression, slowly found her independence, while his daughter thrived in school. And Chris, whether on long drives with his father through the Carolina flatlands to the coast or sitting with him in the house in Columbia amidst the books, bows, guitars, and manuscripts, found in Jim Dickey's clear-eyed love the father he had missed for so long.Drawing on letters, notebooks, diaries, and Chris's explicit conversations with his father about what happened between them, "Summer of Deliverance" is a superbly crafted memoir of the corrosive effects of fame and an inspiring celebration of love between father and son.

    She married a French aristocrat, and narrowly survived the French Revolution, escaping to America at the time of Washington and Jefferson. Here, she lived a life of milking cows and chopping wood, having previously been accustomed to the lavish life of the French court.Returning to France prematurely, Lucie had to flee again, this time to England, where she took up sewing in order to support herself and her family. Repeatedly in the right place at the right time, Lucie saw the Battle of Waterloo, the fall of Napoleon and the return of Louis XVIII, and the Restoration. She was an outstanding diarist and a remarkable woman, who witnessed one of the most dramatic and brutal periods of history, playing the part of observer, commentator and, often, participant.For the last years of her life she was ambassadress to Holland and the Kingdom of Sardinia. Her friends included Wellington, Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. She died, aged 83, in Pisa. Mixing politics and court intrigue, social observation and everyday details about food, work, illness, children, manners and clothes, Caroline Moorehead paints a vivid and memorable portrait of an era - lasting three-quarters of a century - that saw the fortunes of France, as well as those of Lucie herself, rise and fall and rise again. Both as a witness and as a survivor, Lucie is a superb subject for an exemplary biographer.

    A Yale graduate who had grown up in both France and America -- he was then known as Sanche de Gramont and was then a French citizen -- he was drafted into the French Army and served in Algeria 1956 and '57. In this memoir, Morgan relives the harrowing conflict in which every Arab was considered a terrorist -- and increasingly, many were.As a newly minted second lieutenant, he spends months in the back country -- the bled -- where everyone, including himself, becomes involved in unimaginable barbarities. "You cannot fight a guerrilla war with humanitarian principles," a superior officer tells Morgan early on. He beats up and kills a prisoner who won't talk and may have been responsible for the death of a friend. He kills another man in a firefight. He sees men die in encounters too small to be recorded, ones that his fellow soldiers quickly forget. For Morgan, the memories will never go away.Later, in Algiers, Morgan's journalistic experience -- he had spent all of four months as a reporter on the Worcester, MA, Telegram -- gets him a job writing for an official newspaper. He lives through the day-to-day struggle to put down an Arab urban insurgency, the first in modern history, with its unrelenting menu of bombings, assassinations, torture, show trials, executions, and the deliberate humiliation of prisoners. He misses death when a beach casino explodes just as he is going in for lunch. He becomes disillusioned with the war and what it is doing to his country. He is himself arrested, but not for the real offense he committed, helping a deserter to escape.Though the events Ted Morgan describes so vividly happened nearly half a century ago in Algiers, they might as well have taken place in Baghdad today.

    In this timely and controversial examination of civilian-military relations in wartime democracies, Eliot A. Cohen chips away at this time-honored belief with case studies of statesmen who dared to prod, provoke, and even defy their military officers to great effect.Using the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion to build his argument, Cohen offers compelling proof that, as Clemenceau put it, “War is too important to leave to the generals.” By examining the shared leadership traits of four politicians who triumphed in extraordinarily varied military campaigns, Cohen argues that active statesmen make the best wartime leaders, pushing their military subordinates to succeed where they might have failed if left to their own devices. Thought provoking and soundly argued, Cohen's Supreme Command is essential reading not only for military and political players but also for informed citizens and anyone interested in leadership.

    Among the first statesmen to clearly understand the necessity of a balance of powers, he was one of the early realist politicians, practicing in the wake of Niccolò Machiavelli. Truly larger than life, he has captured the imagination of generations, both through his own story and through his portrayal as a ruthless political mastermind in Alexandre Dumas's classic The Three Musketeers.Forging a nation-state amid the swirl of unruly, grasping nobles, widespread corruption, wars of religion, and an ambitious Habsburg empire, Richelieu's hands were always full. Serving his fickle monarch, he mastered the politics of absolute power. Jean-Vincent Blanchard's rich and insightful new biography brings Richelieu fully to life in all his complexity. At times cruel and ruthless, Richelieu was always devoted to creating a lasting central authority vested in the power of monarchy, a power essential to France's position on the European stage for the next two centuries. Richelieu's careful understanding of politics as spectacle speaks to contemporary readers; much of what he accomplished was promoted strategically through his great passion for theater and literature, and through the romance of power. Éminence offers a rich portrait of a fascinating man and his era, and gives us a keener understanding of the dark arts of politics.

    Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

    On a May evening in 1922, the English arts lovers Violet and Sydney Schiff convened a grand dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, following the premiere of a Stravinsky ballet. In addition to guests of honor Stravinsky and Diaghilev, the dinner was attended by Picasso, James Joyce, and finally, arriving around 2:30 in the morning, one more artist at the peak of his fame: Marcel Proust. Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth and most shocking volume of Proust's monumental work In Search of Lost Time, had just appeared, transfixing readers with its finely detailed observations on themes of Jewishness and anti-Semitism, the interplay across social classes, and all manner ofsexual expression. The book's eccentric, ailing author had become a celebrity to French and English-language readers alike, and his presence at the dinner was all the more unusual since Proust rarely went out. In fact, he would be dead only six months later. Acclaimed historian and biographer Davenport-Hines takes the dinner at the Majestic as the leaping-off point for an examination of Proust's last days, and the enormous reaction his novel garnered from its first years of publication. Using accounts by Proust]s contemporaries, including other modernist stars, Proust's dazzled readers, and wealthy patrons such as the Schiffs, Davenport-Hines illuminates the Paris of the author's last days.

     Instead of a mere two months the Russian campaign would go on to last over five months. Yet, his army would not be overcome in pitched battle, instead it would be decimated by a vicious Russian winter. Prior to the beginning of the war Armand de Caulaincourt served as French ambassador to St. Petersburg and records within his memoirs how he attempted to dissuade Napoleon from his invasion of this vast country. His warnings were, however, not heeded and he went on to serve with Napoleon throughout the conflict as Grand Écuyer, or Master of the Horse, riding at his leader's side through many of the major battles such as Borodino. Caulaincourt continued with Napoleon through his capture of Moscow and warned his commander against wintering in Russia, but again was not listened to, and so records the disintegration of the once magnificent French army. With Napoleon in Russia is a remarkably intimate portrayal of the brilliant general as he suffered one of his greatest defeats. General Armand de Caulaincourt left Russia with Napoleon in December 1812. After this campaign he continued with his critical support of Napoleon right through until the Battle of Waterloo. After which his name was placed upon a list of those proscribed for arrest and execution, but this stopped by the personal intervention of Tsar Alexander I. During his life he kept numerous records and memoirs, which were eventually compiled and translated by Jean Hanoteau in 1935. Caulaincourt passed away in 1827 and the translator of the work Hanoteau died in 1939. B. H. Liddell Hart cited the work extensively when studying why Hitler's invasion of Russia failed in the twentieth century. Yet it was also a favored reference for many of those German commanders, for example General Günther von Kluge, who General Günther Blumentritt recounted: "I can still see von Kluge trudging through the mud from his sleeping quarters to his office, and standing there before the map with Caulaincourt's book in his hand. That went on day after day."

    Linda Sexton was twenty-one when her mother killed herself, and now she looks back, remembers, and tries to come to terms with her mother's life.Life with Anne was a wild mixture of suicidal depression and manic happiness, inappropriate behavior, and midnight trips to the psychiatric ward. Anne taught Linda how to write, how to see, how to imagine--and only Linda could have written a book that captures so vividly the intimate details and lingering emotions of their life together. "Searching for Mercy Street" speaks to everyone who admires Anne Sexton and to every daughter or son who knows the pain of an imperfect childhood. This beautiful new trade paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author.

    The lack of coherent strategic direction from Paris in the chaotic years of the Fourth Republic left the military with the task of making political decisions in the field. With the original introduction by Bernard B. Fall and a new foreword prepared by Eliot A. Cohen.

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    Such was the life of many young women of the age: they had no independent status under the law and were entirely a part of their husband’s property once married.  Marie and Hortense, however, had other ambitions in mind altogether. Miserable in their marriages and determined to live independently, they abandoned their husbands in secret and began lives of extraordinary daring on the run and in the public eye. The beguiling sisters quickly won the affections of noblemen and kings alike. Their flight became popular fodder for salon conversation and tabloids, and was closely followed by seventeenth-century European society. The Countess of Grignan remarked that they were traveling “like two heroines out of a novel.” Others gossiped that they “were roaming the countryside in pursuit of wandering lovers.”  Their scandalous behavior—disguising themselves as men, gambling, and publicly disputing with their husbands—served as more than just entertainment. It sparked discussions across Europe concerning the legal rights of husbands over their wives.Elizabeth Goldsmith’s vibrant biography of the Mancini sisters—drawn from personal papers of the players involved and the tabloids of the time—illuminates the lives of two pioneering free spirits who were feminists long before the word existed.

    Washington could not have known it, but the brief and deadly exchange of fire that ensued lit the match that, in Horace Walpole's memorable phrase, would set the world on fire. The resultung French and Indian War in North America became part of the global conflict known as the Seven Years War, fought across Europe, India, and the East and West Indies. Before it ended, nearly one million men had died. Empires at War captures the sweeping panorama of this first world war, especially in its descriptions of the strategy and intensity of the engagements in North America, many of them epic struggles between armies in the wilderness. William M. Fowler Jr. views the conflict both from British prime minister William Pitt's perspective-- as a vast chessboard, on which William Shirley's campaign in North America and the fortunes of Frederick the Great of Prussia were connected-- and from that of field commanders on the ground in America and Canada, who contended with disease, brutal weather, and scant supplies, frequently having to build the very roads they marched on. As in any conflict, individuals and events stand out: Sir William Johnson, a baronet and a major general of the British forces, who sometimes painted his face and dressed like a warrior when he fought beside his Indian allies; Edward Braddock's doomed march across Pennsylvania; the valiant French defense of Fort Ticonderoga; and the legendary battle for Quebec between armies led by the arisocratic French tactical genius, the marquis de Montcalm, and thegallant, if erratic, young Englishman James Wolfe-- both of whom died on the Plains of Abraham on September 13, 1759. For many, the French and Indian War has been merely the backdrop for James Fenimore Cooper's famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans. William M. Fowler Jr.'s engrossing narrative reveals it to have been a turning point of modern history, without which the American Revolution as we know it might well not have occurred.

    That crusade almost wiped out the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians whose beliefs threatened the authority of the Catholic Church. But decades of harrowing repression-enforced by the ruthless Pope Boniface VIII , the Machiavellian French King Philip the Fair of France, and the pitiless grand inquisitor of Toulouse, Bernard Gui (the villain in The Name of the Rose)-had bred resentment. In the city of Carcassonne, anger at the abuses of the Inquisition reached a boiling point and a great orator and fearless rebel emerged to unite the resistance among Cathar and Catholic alike. The people rose up, led by the charismatic Franciscan friar Bernard Délicieux and for a time reclaimed control of their lives and communities. Having written the acclaimed chronicle of the Cathars The Perfect Heresy , Stephen O'Shea returns to the medieval world to chronicle a rare and remarkable story of personal courage and principle standing up to power, amidst the last vestiges of the endlessly fascinating Cathar world.Praise for The Perfect Heresy :"At once a cautionary tale about the corruption of temporal power...and an accounting of the power of faith ...It is also just a darn good read."-Baltimore Sun "An accessible, readable history with lessons ...that were not learned by broad humanity until it saw 20th-century tyrants applying the goals and methods of the Inquisition on a universal scale."-New York Times