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Maggie Brookes is an ex-journalist, BBC TV producer and creative writing lecturer, now full-time novelist and poet. She was born in London and has been writing stories and poems since she was six.

Maggie says: "The principal theme which recurs in my work is the strength and courage of women in adversity. I am drawn to stories which take place in wartime because because of my parents’ experience in the second world war. My dad was a prisoner of war and my mum was a nurse. I think I get my abhorrence of war from the waste of life they witnessed. War shows the human race at its worst, and yet can also bring out the best of it."

In this conversation Maggie reveals how she uncovered the Spanish Civil war's hidden heroes for her latest book, Acts of Love and War and how she feels her way into an authentic version of the past. Plus her intriguing encounter in a lift!

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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99-year-old Professor George Leitmann is a unique man. He is both a holocaust survivor and a WW2 US Army veteran who helped to liberate Nazi occupied France and Germany.

Nazi persecution of Jewish people forced George and his family to flee their home in Austria and emigrate to the USA. Tragically, his father Josef was unable to get a visa to join them. Initially the family received Red Cross Messages from Josef but by 1940 these had stopped.

As soon as he was old enough, George volunteered to join the United States Army, becoming an non-commissioned officer with the 286th Combat Engineer Battalion. In 1944, he sailed back across the Atlantic and returned to European soil, this time as a soldier in order to fight the scourge of fascism and look for his father. His tremendous acts of bravery and sacrifice were recognised when he was awarded the prestigious French Legion of Honour in 2013.

I am hugely grateful to George for sharing his extraordinary story with me in this remarkable episode.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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In this episode, award-winning historical fiction author, Hazel Gaynor remembers the World War Two ‘seaevacuees’, the children sent away from Britain by sea to escape the bombings at home. This is an often-forgotten part of the history of the war, overshadowed by more familiar events, and it inspired Hazel to write her new novel, The Last Lifeboat.

Here she shares the heroine at the heart of this survival story, how she researched it and why these women and children deserve to be remembered.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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In The Sugar Girls of Love Lane, out today, Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, the authors of the Sunday Times bestseller The Sugar Girls, tell the remarkable stories of those who worked at the famous Tate & Lyle factory in Liverpool.

For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate’s flagship sugar refinery at Love Lane dominated the Liverpool skyline – and was the beating heart of the local community. More than 10,000 workers passed through the doors of the factory during its lifetime, with some families counting four or even five generations of service. Young women leaving school in the post-war years were drawn by the good wages and the unrivalled social life that Tate & Lyle offered.

When they arrived, they started at the very bottom, sweeping sugar off the floors, before graduating to packing and weighing by hand. The work was tough, with girls expected to stack heavy bags of sugar onto pallets five feet high, and by the end of the day their arms were aching and their stockings full of sugar dust. But, despite the hot, heavy work, they found their own ways of having fun, and the friendships they formed would last a lifetime. As well as the female friendships, many women met their future husbands at the factory, and expected their own children to follow in their footsteps.

Duncan and Nuala's social history of the post-war era casts a warm and nostalgic look back at one of the most iconic factories in the north, bringing back a vanished era of hard work, community spirit and simple pleasures.

In this episode, Duncan reveals how he set about researching and writing his latest book, the challenges of writing non-fiction and why social histories set in the 1960s are ripe for exploration.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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‘Reading gives us a privacy of the mind. Librarians are heroes.’ Librarian turned bestselling author Janet Skeslien Charles told me.

In this episode we discuss the remarkable true story behind the brave Parisian librarians in WW2 who inspired The Paris Library.

Her new book, Miss Morgan's Book Brigade, out April 30 2024, based on a true story of a group of intrepid women who lived in a crumbling chateau 40 miles from the front in WW1 to help heal the atrocities of war. We discuss censorship, the craft of writing, plotting and the research that helps us feel our way into the past. Janet is the ultimate bibliophile. If you love books about books, this is the episode for you.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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This year marks 112 years since the Titanic hit an iceberg on 14 April 1912, and in that time the doomed vessel has spawned countless myths, thousands of books and, of course, James Cameron’s Oscar-winning film Titanic . But In our quest to get to get closer to the so-called ‘Ship of Dreams’ have we overlooked the human tragedy at the heart of the disaster? In this conversation, historian and author Claes Wetterholm, from Stockholm, reveals some heartbreaking, untold personal stories…

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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Libraries are about so much more than books. Just ask librarian for Kingston Upon Thames, Marion Tessier, who trained as a boardgame librarian. On National Boardgame Day, she gives us a fasincating glimpse into her job.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.

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Brianna Labuskes is more than just a gifted writer, she is a story hunter, who delves deep into the past and finds histories forgotten heroines.

In this fascinating conversation, Brianna shares the true story of the Council of Books in Wartime--the WWII organisation founded by booksellers, publishers, librarians, and authors to use books as "weapons in the war of ideas" This book inspired, The Librarian of Burned Books.

Her latest, The Lost Book of Bonn, is about the librarians who worked for the Library of Congress, sent to Germany as part of an effort led by the Monuments Men to return Nazi-plundered books to their rightful owners.

Both of these titles are a book lovers dream.

'Language has always been a reflection of ourselves, and silencing it, banning it, destroying it, silences, bans and destroys people,' Brianna says.

Thank you to our media partner: Family History Zone – a website covering archives, history and genealogy. Please check then out at www.familyhistory.zone and consider signing up for their free weekly newsletter.