Showing results for "life-" in Historical

Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were roused out of bed in the dark and lifted into the buggy, squashed in with bedding, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her mother shouting back towards the house, 'Good-bye, Rothsay, I hope I never see you again!' When Kate Grenville’s mother died, she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change.

Sir Hubert Wilkins is one of the most remarkable Australians who ever lived. The son of pioneer pastoralists in South Australia, Hubert studied engineering before moving on to photography, then sailing for England and a job producing films with the Gaumont Film Co. Brave and bold, he became a polar expeditioner, a brilliant war photographer, a spy in the Soviet Union, a pioneering aviator-navigator, a death-defying submariner - all while being an explorer and chronicler of the planet and its life forms that would do Vasco da Gama and Sir David Attenborough proud.

In 1938, 29-year-old 'Nicky' cancelled a ski holiday and instead spent nine months masterminding a seemingly impossible plan to rescue hundreds of Jewish children and find them homes in the UK. Over 6,000 people are alive today because of his efforts. What motivated an ordinary man to do something so extraordinary? This book, written by his daughter, Barbara, explores the 106-year life of an incredible humanitarian, a man whose legacy only came to public light decades later.

The stories shared with me about Lena, my husband’s mother, were extraordinary. I heard many of them over the years, tales told to me by her son and his father, accounts that were often shocking, sometimes heart-wrenching, and always fascinating.

On the night of April 14, 1865, the nation reeled in horror as President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre by the famed actor John Wilkes Booth. In this gripping 19th-century account, journalist George Alfred Townsend delivers a detailed and chilling narrative of Booth’s descent into infamy, the conspiracy that rocked the nation, and the relentless manhunt that followed.

Dante's vision, The Divine Comedy, has profoundly affected every generation since it first appeared in the early 14th century. Here is a brief account of his life, compiled from various sources (including his first biographer, Boccaccio) by Benedict Flynn. It sets the known facts of Dante's life against the turmoil of the times, and puts the very personal nature of his poetry into perspective.

Fifty Percent of Mountaineering Is Uphill is the enthralling true story of Jasper's Willi Pfisterer, a legend in the field of mountaineering and safety in the Rocky Mountains. For more than thirty years, Willi was an integral part of Jasper's alpine landscape, guiding climbers up to the highest peaks, and rescuing them from perilous situations.

When Grandma Rosi was 23, she was expelled from Nazi Germany and interned as a refugee in Zbąszyń, Poland. She used her diary to document every detail of her experiences, from being deported by the Gestapo to stolen conversations with her first love. When Jess was 23, she was living in London, struggling with a fledgling acting career, a failed love life and rock-bottom self-esteem. She used her diary to rant about her mum and track her daily calories.

Who was the first fascist? Decades before Mussolini, the Marquis de Morès was the first populist and openly antisemitic leader in the Western world. A key figure behind the Dreyfus affair, he took France by storm with his inflammatory media rhetoric and violent stunts. Morès invoked the fasces – the ancient Roman bundle of wooden rods – to symbolize the society he wished to create: a union of all social classes against their enemy, the Jews. In The First Fascist, award-winning historian Sergio Luzzatto explores the untold story of the rise and fall of the Marquis as well as his ominous legacy.

Boswell's biography of his friend and hero Samuel Johnson is an acknowledged classic, full of humorous anecdote and rich characterization. Johnson's complex humanity (his depression, fear of death, intellectual brilliance and rough humor) is set within a vivid picture of 18th century London peopled by personalities of the time.

From being transported by the sound of 'True Love' by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly on the radio as a small child living in condemned housing in ungentrified West London in the late 1950s to going out to work as a postman humming 'Watching the Detectives' by Elvis Costello in 1977, Alan Johnson's life has always had a musical soundtrack. In fact music hasn't just accompanied his life, it's been an integral part of it.

How could a man be reviled, even assassinated, during his own life, and yet have people's opinion of him change after his death? Explore the life of Dion, a wealthy Syracusian aristocrat of great learning whose life brutally ended on a feast-day. How could a man of acclaimed courteous temperment be accused of such horrible crimes?

An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic chief justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far.

The emperor Nero's reign is one weird tale of sexual depravity and extravagant sadism. He was a gifted musician, and is said to have given great concerts of which attendance was compulsory; women were said to have given birth during the performance, and men were driven to fake death to escape. Nero kicked his pregnant wife to death and then had a young boy castrated to replace her as his spouse; then, during the great fire of Rome, he is said to have played the lyre to emphasize the beauty of the destruction. His eccentricities are a continuation of the tradition of his predecessors, only more perverted; Suetonius' account portray a strange man in strange times.