Immortalised in Christopher Isherwood’s classic novel Mr Norris Changes Trains, Gerald Hamilton was the real-life model for the seedy but beguiling Mr Norris. Isherwood put him on the literary map but he was on other maps already, including those of police forces across Europe, and he was interned in Brixton prison during both world wars as a threat to national security. A Communist agent in the Thirties, Hamilton later drifted to the right and put his faith in the “sacred cause†of ...

Mike Walker’s gripping BBC Radio drama about money, art, religion, politics and powerFlorence, 1415. Banker Cosimo Medici is looked down upon as a jumped up money-changer. Then he marries the noble Contessina de Bardi and becomes the richest man in Europe. But his wealth and power threaten the Florentine elite, who are determined to bring him down...However, the House of Medici cannot be crushed that easily. Sixty years and many violent deaths later, the fa...

The New York Times –bestselling biography that "explores the mind of one of the most vilified women of the twentieth century" ( USA Today ).This is the story of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee notorious for allegedly seducing a British king off his throne. "That woman," so called by Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, was born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896 in Baltimore. Nei...

Paul Doiron's The Poacher's Son is a sterling debut of literary suspense. Taut and engrossing, it represents the first in a series featuring Mike Bowditch.Set in the wilds of Maine, this is an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive—his own fatherGame warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father Jack, a hard drinking woman...

Her weapons: money and power. Her target: the most dangerous man in the world—her own son. Elizabeth Wyckham Scarlatti has a plan, a desperate, last-minute gamble designed to save the world from her son, Ulster, an incalculably cruel man who is working for the Third Reich under the name of Heinrich Kroeger. If Elizabeth cannot stop him, Ulster will give Hitler the most powerful instrument on earth.Praise for Robert Ludlum and The Scarlatti Inheritance...

Beginning with an atmospheric account of Tyburn, we are set up for a grisly excursion through London as a city of ne'er do wells, taking in beheadings and brutality at the Tower, Elizabethan street crime, cutpurses and con-men, through to the Gordon Riots and Highway robbery of the 18thcentury and the rise of prisons, the police and the Victorian era of incarceration. As well as the crimes, Arnold also looks at the grotesque punishments meted out to those who transgressed the law throughou...

“A sympathetic and believable portrait” of the American woman for whom King Edward VIII gave up the throne, with photos included (Christian Science Monitor).A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge, and each marked off by some intense experience.It was the love story of the century—the king and the commoner. In December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to...

Our view of the famous is one-dimensional—leading figures from history are summarized in history textbooks with one or two lines: Churchill the war-time genius, Gandhi the poor ascetic—but nobody is perfect and even the famous have their quirks and hidden secrets. How George Washington Fleeced the Nation reveals the often hilarious, sometimes shocking, and always highly informative foibles of the great and the good. Einstein, the most brilliant man who lived, regularly forgot his ...

Queen Victoria was the longest reigning monarch in British history. In this concise biography, Lady Longford, long recognised as an authority on the subject, gives a full account of Queen Victoria's life and provides her unique assessment of the monarch. Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 on the death of her uncle William IV. In 1840 she married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and for the next twenty years they were inseparable. Their descendants we...

From the New York Times– bestselling author of The Rebel Romanov , an "absorbing account of the making of a queen through her awful, protracted grief" ( Kirkus Reviews ).As she did in her critically acclaimed The Last Days of the Romanovs, Helen Rappaport brings a compelling documentary feel to the story of this royal marriage ...

“[A] shimmering and rather wonderful biography.” —The GuardianWhen Queen Victoria died in 1901, she had ruled for nearly sixty-four years. She was the mother of nine and grandmother of forty-two and the matriarch of royal Europe through her children’s marriages. To many, Queen Victoria is a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique, an aging, stiff widow paraded as the figurehead to an all-male imperial enterprise. But in truth, Britain’s longest-reigning monarc...

The unputdownable biography of the enigmatic spy and traitor Guy Burgess: 'More riveting than a spy novel' - Sunday TelegraphGuy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, ...