Showing titles in Politics & Activism

How far would you go for someone you love...on a unicycle? Brothers and sisters often dare each other to do things – it's what siblings do. However, when Connie Johnson dared her brother, Samuel, to embark on a one-wheeled odyssey around Australia, she knew it was a big ask. But Connie knew exactly what she was doing and was sure he wouldn't say no. Not this time. Born a year apart, Connie and Samuel Johnson have always been close.

A rousing tale of espionage and unsung valor, this is the captivating true story of Vera Atkins, Great Britain's spymistress from the age of 25. With her fierce intelligence, blunt manner, personal courage, and exceptional informants, Vera ran countless missions throughout the 1930s. After rising to the leadership echelon in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert intelligence agency formed by Winston Churchill, she became head of a clandestine army in World War II.

Queen Elizabeth II was famous for longer than anyone who has ever lived. When people spoke of her, they spoke of themselves; when they dreamed of her, they dreamed of themselves. She mirrored their hopes and anxieties. To the optimist, she seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist; to the awestruck, charismatic; and to the cynical, humdrum. Though by nature reserved and unassuming, her presence could fill presidents and rock gods with terror. For close to a century, she inhabited the psyche of a nation.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s election, feeling that her country—her life—has become unrecognizable, Chelsea Handler has an awakening. Fed up with the privileged bubble she’s lived in, she decides it’s time to make some changes.

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is one of the most dramatic and bloody events in English history. Starting with village riots in the Essex countryside, chaos rapidly spread across much of the southeast of England, as tens of thousands of ordinary men and women marched in fury to London, torching houses, slaughtering their social superiors and terrifying the life out of those who got in their way. The burning down of Savoy Palace, home to the most powerful magnate in the realm, marked one of the Revolt’s most violent episodes.

The inspiration for The Comey Rule, the Showtime limited series starring Jeff Daniels premiering September 2020 The sensational number one bestseller about taking on the mafia, the Clintons and Trump. In his Number One bestselling memoir A Higher Loyalty, former FBI director James Comey shares...

For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.

Many indeed are the biographies of Winston Churchill, one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. But what was that influence, and how did he use it in the furtherance of his and his country's ambitions? For the first time, Professor William Nestor has delved into the life and actions of Churchill to examine just how skillfully he manipulated events to place him in positions of power.

In this poignant memoir, Charles Spencer recounts the trauma of being sent away from home at age eight to attend a boarding school. A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed firsthand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Spencer attended in his youth and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, he reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, describing the pain of homesickness and the appalling inescapability of it all.

Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Richard D. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny became a legend in his own time. "Hitler's favorite commando" acquired a reputation as a man of daring, renowned for his audacious 1943 mission to extricate Mussolini from a mountain-top prison. He could be brave and resourceful, but was also a notorious egoist and an unrepentant Nazi until the end of his life. Stuart Smith draws on years of in-depth research to uncover the truth about Skorzeny's career and complex personality.

In Goering, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel use firsthand testimonies and a variety of historical documents to tell the story of a monster lurking in Hitler's shadows. After rising through the ranks of the German army, Hermann Goering became Hitler's right hand man and was hand-picked to head the Luftwaffe, one of history's most feared fighting forces. As he rose in power, though, Goering became disillusioned and was eventually shunned from Hitler's inner circle.

Stirringly evocative, thought provoking, and often jaw dropping, The Operator ranges across SEAL Team Operator Robert O'Neill's awe-inspiring 400-mission career that included his involvement in attempts to rescue "Lone Survivor" Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips and culminated in those famous three shots that dispatched the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

Virginal, chaste, humble, patiently waiting for rescue by brave knights and handsome princes: this idealized—and largely mythical—notion of the medieval noblewoman still lingers. Yet the reality was very different, as Kelcey Wilson-Lee shows in this vibrant account of the five daughters of Edward I, often known as Longshanks. The lives of these sisters—Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth—ran the gamut of experiences open to royal women in the Middle Ages.

In his best-selling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi Germany, repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. In this revealing new biography, author Martin Kitchen disputes Speer's lifelong assertions of ignorance and innocence, portraying a far darker figure who was deeply implicated in the appalling crimes committed by the regime he served so well. Kitchen reconstructs Speer's life with what we now know, including information from valuable new sources that have come to light only in recent years.

In her relationship with Charles, which has survived for more than 40 years, Camilla's story has seen a great many myths. This book is the definitive account. The relationship between Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is one of the most remarkable love stories of the age. It has endured against all the odds and, in the process, nearly destroyed the British monarchy.

This is the strange and fascinating life of Erwin Rommel, from his days as a youth in Imperial Germany - when he had a child out of wedlock with an early girlfriend - through his lauded military exploits during World War I to his death by suicide during World War II, after he attempted a failed coup against Hitler. Rommel was a man of contradictions: a soldier who wrote a best-selling book about World War I, a commander who went from commanding Hitler's bodyguard to trying to kill him, and a serious military mind who was known for participating in practical jokes.

The Scottish-born son of a failed weaver and a mother who supported the family by binding shoes, Andrew Carnegie was the embodiment of the American dream. In his rise from a job as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory to being the richest man in the world, he was single-minded, relentless and a major player in some of the most violent and notorious labor strikes of the time. The prototype of today's billionaire, he was a visionary in the way he earned his money and in the way he gave it away.

When Michael Cohen's secret payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels on behalf of Donald Trump made Cohen look like a liability to the by-then-president of the United States, the end to their decade-long relationship came swiftly—with a knock on the door from the FBI. Soon, Cohen would find himself imprisoned—even though he had plenty of evidence to show he was innocent of most of the charges.

An international best seller that has sold more than a million copies in the UK, Dreams from My Father is a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking big questions about identity and belonging. The son of a Black African father and a white American mother, Barack Obama recounts an emotional odyssey, retracing the migration of his mother’s family from Kansas to Hawai’i, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.