This is a magisterial, sweeping biography of one of the great leaders of the 20th century - General Charles De Gaulle.

    From difficult childhoods to fashion icons, from love matches to divorces, and from unrehearsed coronations to assassination attempts and untimely deaths.Curiosity about Britain’s rulers and their next of kin never seems to wane, and it is this compendium about the lives of the members of the Royal Family that makes this so utterly compelling.

    Pablo Escobar lay dead, the Cali Cartel had taken over much of the global supply, and an avalanche of coke was poised to hit Europe. Now the British government wanted Chandler and his team to do the impossible: infiltrate the most powerful crime syndicates on earth and stop their drug shipments. It was a perilous assignment. The cartel bosses operated like a lethal multi-national, with armies of hitmen and myriad spies in ports, airports, police stations and government offices. Their intelligence systems flushed out turncoats and traitors, and they ruthlessly exterminated their enemies. Yet Chandler, an HM Customs investigator fluent in Spanish, knew he could only succeed by recruiting local informants, and went out into the field to find them. Within four years he had a network of fifty agents buried deep inside the trafficking organisations. The result was unprecedented. Their intel led to the arrest of hundreds of narcos and to the seizure of 300 tonnes of drugs, worth a staggering $3 billion. Chandler's web disrupted the Bogotá mafia, who controlled the main airport and boasted they could put anything on a plane, from drugs to bombs; penetrated the go-fast crews who raced coke-laden speedboats to the transit station of Jamaica; dismantled the 'rip-on' teams who smuggled through the coastal ports; and identified the so-called motherships, the largest method of bulk transit ever discovered. He faced appalling risks. Treacherous stool pigeons worked for both sides, and some of his Colombian law-enforcement colleagues were abducted, tortured and killed. Chandler too faced a grave threat when the crime lords learned he was responsible for a string of interdictions. Yet he persisted, driven to continue with the greatest series of sustained seizures ever made, until he finally burned out and his tour of duty came to an end. Two of his best sources were subsequently murdered, and his bosses dropped the entire overseas informant programme, with dire consequences. Narco Wars is an unflinching story of danger fear and stress, and of the tradecraft and unsung heroism of the agents and their handlers.

    While paying tribute to Slovakia's resilience and struggle for survival, it describes contributions to European civilization in the Middle Ages; the development of Slovak consciousness in response to Magyarization; its struggle for autonomy in Czechoslovakia after the Treaty of Versailles; its resistance, as the first Slovak Republic, to a Nazi-controlled Europe; its reaction to Communism; and the path that led to the creation of the second Slovak Republic. Now fully updated to the present day, the book examines the vagaries of Slovak post-Communist politics that led to Slovakia's membership in NATO and the European Union.

    

    On her father's death six years later, she inherited the Swedish throne. She was tutored by Descartes, yet could swear like the roughest soldier. She was painted a lesbian, a prostitute, a hermaphrodite, and an atheist; in that tumultuous age, it is hard to determine which was the most damning label. She was learned but restless, progressive yet self-indulgent; her leadership was erratic, her character unpredictable. Sweden was too narrow for her ambition. No sooner had she enjoyed the lavish celebrations of her officialcoronation at twenty-three than she abdicated, converting to Catholicism (an act of almost foolhardy independence and political challenge) and leaving her cold homeland behind for an extravagant new life in Rome. Christina, Queen of Sweden, longed fatally for adventure.Freed from her crown, Christina cut a breath-taking path across Europe: spending madly, searching for a more prestigious throne to scale, stirring trouble wherever she went. Supported and encouraged in turn by the pope, the king of Spain, and France's powerful Cardinal Mazarin, Christina settled at the luxurious Palazzo Farnese, where she established a lavish salon for Rome's artists and intellectuals. More than once the cross-dressing queen was forced to leave town until a scandal died down. She loved to buckle on a sword and swagger like the men whose company she adored, but the greatest mystery in her life was the true nature of her elusive sexuality, which biographer Veronica Buckley explores with sensitivity and rigor. For a time it seemed there was nothing this extraordinary woman might fear attempting, until a bloody tragedy of her own making foreshadowed her downfall.Pairing painstaking research with a sparkling narrative voice and unerring sense of the age, Veronica Buckley reclaims a protean life that had been preserved mostly as myth. Christina was a child of her time, and her time was one of great change: Europe stood at a crossroads where religion and science, antiquity and modernity, peace and war all met. Christina took what she wanted from each to create the life she most desired, and she dazzled all who met her.

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    How could some of the most distinguished historians of the Hitler era, and some of the most aggresssive and street-smart publishers in the business have been taken in by these documents? This lively, witty account conveys a sobering picture of the ease with which those who profess to purvey the truth can convince themselves of almost anything.

    Complete with maps and illustrations the work reveals the momentous events that were occurring in England during the Dark Ages.

    

    The table of contents reads more like a menu at a good restaurant, where there’s something for everyone’s taste. Each of the 18 chapters tells a unique story about an overlooked or unusual aspect of royal history, spanning centuries and countries, but in no particular order. From first to last, they will take you on a journey through royal history you’ve probably never seen or thought of before. In few – if any – other books will you find the British Monarchy compared to London’s sewer system, or read of the challenges of finding a suitable husband for a 200-plus pound Victorian princess who was nonetheless a “remarkably light dancer.” Rarely are the lives of historic and modern royals from Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great to Prince Charles and Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark “illustrated” not by paintings but by tattoos. Even more intimate topics, like the practice of circumcision among royals – including Princes William and Harry – are explored for the sake of inquiring minds. Chances are, even readers who usually find historic royalty boring and stuffy or modern royalty anachronistic and detached will find something to enjoy. Who wouldn’t feel a bit satisfied reading about a celebrated 19th century courtesan being paid to steal the thunder of an old and frumpy queen just to prove that queens are expected to be beautiful? It can also be quite amusing to find that a supposedly formal portrait of the current British Royal Family holds hidden, enigmatic clues to family dynamics and individual personalities that amuse and baffle.In short (much like the Court dwarfs you’ll read about), this book will leave you with a sense that you not only know royal history – and enjoy it – but that you have also journeyed through it and know the royals personally, from who exterminates their palaces right down to their infamous last words."I enjoyed these essays on royalty, which range widely from the beauty of Queens to court dwarfs and royal circumcision. Readers will find an impressively wide span of history enjoyably investigated." – Hugo VickersHugo Vickers, author of “Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of The Duchess of Windsor,” is a writer and broadcaster who has written biographies of many twentieth century figures.

    Far larger than the much more famous domains of Alexander the Great and ancient Rome, it has since been surpassed in overall size and reach only by the British Empire. The Rise and Fall of the Second Largest Empire in the World recounts the spectacularly rapid expansion and dramatic decline of the Mongol realm, while examining its real, widespread, and enduring influence on countless communities from the DanubeRiver to the Pacific Ocean.

     "By Permission of Heaven" is a thrilling account of the Great Fire of London that makes terrific use of a vast array of first-person accounts and forensic investigation. The result is an impeccable achievement in historical storytelling that calls to mind equal parts Patricia Cornwell, Sebastian Junger, and Iain Pears. "By Permission of Heaven" follows the conflagration from its beginnings in a Pudding Lane baker's kitchen in 1666 through the extreme devastation it wreaked. Adrian Tinniswood recounts the horror and wonder that gripped the city as the flames spread, destroying 13,200 homes, ninety-three churches, St. Paul's Cathedral, and every administrative building in the capital. While looting, savage violence, panic, and chaos reigned within the city and war raged without, hundreds of thousands buried their most precious possessions and fled, never again to see the Lon-don they knew. Finely depicted here are the towering figures of Restoration England, such as Charles II, Samuel Pepys, and Christopher Wren, who played critical roles in the fire and its aftermath. Tinnis-wood also brings to life the schoolchildren, servants, clerks, and courtiers of the day as they watched the streets run with fire and the greatest city in Britain disappear before their eyes.

    It covered 2,000 kilometres and was raced in appalling conditions across the battlefields of the Western Front, otherwise known as the Zone Rouge. The race was so tough that only 21 riders finished, and it was never staged again.With one of the most demanding routes ever to feature in a bicycle race, and plagued by appalling weather conditions, the Circuit des Champs de Bataille was beyond gruelling, but today its extraordinary story is largely forgotten. Many of the riders came to the event straight from the army and had to ride 18-hour stages through sleet and snow across the battlefields on which they had fought, and lost friends and family, only a few months before. But in addition to the hellish conditions there were moments of high comedy, even farce.The rediscovered story of the Circuit des Champs de Bataille is an epic tale of human endurance, suffering and triumph over extreme adversity.

    England had been ravaged for decades by conspiracy, violence, murders, coups and countercoups. Through luck, guile and ruthlessness, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor kings, had clambered to the top of the heap--a fugitive with a flimsy claim to England's throne. For many he remained a usurper, a false king.But Henry had a crucial asset: his queen and their children, the living embodiment of his hoped-for dynasty. Queen Elizabeth was a member of the House of York. Henry himself was from the House of Lancaster, so between them they united the warring parties that had fought the bloody century-long War of the Roses. Now their older son, Arthur, was about to marry a Spanish princess. On a cold November day sixteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon arrived in London for a wedding that would mark a triumphal moment in Henry's reign.In this remarkable book, Thomas Penn re-creates the story of the tragic, magnetic Henry VII--a controlling, paranoid, avaricious monarch who was entering the most perilous years of his long reign.Rich with drama and insight, Winter King is an astonishing story of pageantry, treachery, intrigue and incident--and the fraught, dangerous birth of Tudor England.