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In winter 1952, London automobiles and thousands of coal-burning hearths belched particulate matter into the air. But the smog that descended on December 5th of 1952 was different; it was a type that held the city hostage for five long days. Mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and 12,000 people died. That same month, there was another killer at large in London: John Reginald Christie, who murdered at least six women. In a...
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"In the spring of 1939, with the Second World War looming, two determined twenty-four-year-olds, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, decided to open a marriage bureau. They found a tiny office on London's Bond Street and set about the delicate business of matchmaking. Drawing on the bureau's extensive archives, Penrose Halsonwho many years later found herself the proprietor of the bureautells their story, and those of their clients."--Back cover.
3) Dead doubles: the extraordinary worldwide hunt for one of the Cold War's most notorious spy rings
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English
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An account of one of the most notorious spy cases from the Cold War traces the 1961 international manhunt for five Soviet spies whose activities exposed the shadowy world of deep-cover KGB operatives.
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English
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The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago, when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson's rich storytelling gifts rivet us with the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. That summer of 1911, a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were...
5) Operation Columba, the secret pigeon service: the untold story of World War II resistance in Europe
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English
Description
The fascinating, untold story of how British intelligence secretly used homing pigeons as part of a clandestine espionage operation to gather information, communicate, and coordinate with members of the Resistance to defeat the Nazis in occupied Europe during World War II. Between 1941 and 1944, British intelligence dropped sixteen thousand homing pigeons in an arc across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Bordeaux, France to Copenhagen, Denmark, as part...
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Denis Lipman left London's East End for Washington, DC more than 20 years ago, but made an annual pilgrimage year after year to visit aging parents, a pair of cantankerous, real-life Cockneys. He endured the visits as best he could. Enter an American wife. Not content with a grin-and-bear-it attitude, she declares that since each year's trip to England was inevitable, it was to be enjoyed: see the sites, taste the culture, go places! Against his will,...
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Queen Mary's diary and the recollections of an under-chauffeur to the Portuguese ambassador are two of the disparate sources Nicholson (The Perfect Summer) uses in her anecdotal account of the period between the end of WWI on November 11, 1918, and the burial of an unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey two years later. Vividly portraying the horrors of trench warfare and the misery of the bereaved and wounded, she uses the metaphor of the great silence-two...
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Tells the story of the infamous British military operation, the Dambusters raid. This aerial bombing attack, called Operation Chastise, was responsible for the overnight destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams in northwest Germany by Britain's Royal Air Force 617 Squadron, an epic wartime maneuver that has become military legend.
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"Nellie Dowell was a match-factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soul mates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century...
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One of our finest narrative historians, and journalist for the SUNDAY TIMES and LITERARY REVIEW, Lawrence James, has written a genuinely new biography of Winston Churchill, set within a fully detailed historical context, but solely focusing on his relationship with the British Empire. As a young army officer in the late 19th century, Churchill's first experience of the Empire was serving in conflicts in India, South Africa and the Sudan. His attitude...
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"Renowned historian Max Hastings recreates one of the most thrilling events of World War II: Operation Pedestal, the British action to save its troops from starvation on Malta--an action-packed tale of courage, fortitude, loss, and triumph against all odds. In 1940, Hitler had two choices when it came to the Mediterranean region: stay out, or commit sufficient forces to expel the British from the Middle East. Against his generals' advice, the Fuhrer...
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"An admirably balanced assessment of an enormously complicated man who, wrongly but not ignobly, stood athwart history." - Kirkus Reviews, starred
"Elegantly written, delicately nuanced, this compelling account brings Joe Kennedy and his family to life." - Bob Self, author of Neville Chamberlain: A Biography
"A thoroughly revisionist but remarkably persuasive history of Joseph P. Kennedy's years in London" - David Nasaw , author of Pulitzer Prize–nominee...
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Pub. Date
2012
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English
Description
"Marvelous and entertaining." -Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey
Discover the true stories behind the women who inspired DowntonAbbey and HBO's The Gilded Age, the heiresses-including a Vanderbilt (railroads), a LaRoche (pharmaceuticals), and a Rogers (oil)-who staked their ground in England, swapping dollars for titles and marrying peers of the British realm. Filled with vivid personalities, grand houses, dashing earls, and a wealth...
15) An English Queen and Stalingrad: The Story Of Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (1900–2002)
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English
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The author traces the Queen Mother's formative years, her family life in the palace environment, her growing adoration and ascension to the British throne, how she arranged aid to Stalingrad and was ultimately named an honorary citizen of that city, and other little-known details from the life of the Queen and her circle.
With a foreword by Yuri Fokin, Russia's ambassador to the UK in the period 1997—2000, who was personally acquainted with the...
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English
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The Troubles may have developed into a sectarian conflict, but the violence was sparked by a small band of leftists who wanted Derry in October 1968 to be a repeat of Paris in May 1968. Like their French comrades, Northern Ireland's 'sixty-eighters' had assumed that street fighting would lead to political struggle. The struggle that followed, however, was between communities rather than classes. In the divided society of Northern Ireland, the interaction...
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British historian Burleigh (Blood Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism) delivers a long, riveting account of the awful atrocities of WWII and the perverted reasoning behind them. Burleigh explains that Communist, Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese systems claimed to be regimes of public virtue carrying out inexorable historical processes. Proclaiming that the only evil was obstructing this march to utopia, they discarded the rule of law and alternative...
18) Queen Consort
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Pub. Date
2018
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English
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Description
“Thoroughly well-written, this is a believable portrait of a woman who did not seek publicity or a royal role but instead to support the love of her life, Prince Charles.” —Library Journal (starred review)
In the first in-depth biography of Camilla—the infamous other woman who made the marriage of Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana "a bit crowded"—esteemed royal biographer
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On June 28, 1914, in the dusty Balkan town of Sarajevo, an assassin fired two shots. In the next five minutes, as the stout middle-aged Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife bled to death, a dynasty-and with it, a whole way of life-began to topple.
In the ages before World War I, four dynasties-the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov-dominated much of civilization. Outwardly different, they...
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Illustrated with 3 charts, 28 maps and 88 photos. This insightful work by David N. Spires holds many lessons in tactical air-ground operations. Despite peacetime rivalries in the drafting of service doctrine, in World War II the immense pressures of wartime drove army and air commanders to cooperate in the effective prosecution of battlefield operations. In northwest Europe during the war, the combination of the U.S. Third Army commanded by Lt. Gen....
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