This autobiography tells the story of an indefatigable spirit who survived the Second World War, a doomed marriage, the murder of her father, rape, and the almost endless consternation of family problems.Author Dr. Nina Murray was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1913. As a child, she found herself part of the first of the Diaspora that marked the modern age. The Communist revolution stripped her family, Russian nobility, of their land, money, privilege, and title.Blessed ...

In December of 1992, filming began on a secret Fantastic Four movie. Several months earlier, Bernd Eichinger met with legendary producer and director Roger Corman about making the movie before his rights expired at the end of the year. The movie was finished in 1993 and scheduled for a 1994 release. Before the premiere, Marvel bought the film and the negative was destroyed. The Fantastic Four would never be seen. However, a single copy made during a routine transfer leaked out and found it...

Lionel Logue was a self-taught and almost unknown Australian speech therapist. Yet it was this outgoing, amiable man who almost single-handedly turned the nervous, tongue-tied Duke of York into one of Britain's greatest kings after his brother, Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 over his love for Mrs Simpson.The King's Speech is the previously untold story of the remarkable relationship between Logue and the haunted future King George VI, written with Logue's grandson and drawing exclu...

A life of love and glamour as a 19th Century British Duchess: the perfect read for fans of BRIDGERTON and DOWNTON ABBEY'Wonderfully evocative [...] now reissued in an elegant new edition' ― Country LifeConsuelo Vanderbilt was young, beautiful and the heir to a vast family fortune. She was also deeply in love with an American suitor when her mother chose instead for her to fulfil her social ambitions and marry an English Duke. Leavi...

In this charming and intimate memoir, the youngest daughter of Winston Churchill shares stories from her remarkable life—and tells of the unbreakable bond she forged with her father through some of the most tumultuous years in British history.Through a combination of personal reminiscences and never-before-published diary entries, Mary Soames, the youngest daughter of Clementine and Winston Churchill, describes what it was like growing up as the scion of one of the...

A family memoir that traces the myths, legends, and secrets of seven generations of remarkable womenAll families have their myths and legends. For many years Juliet Nicolson accepted hers--the dangerous beauty of her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita Sackville-West, her mother's Tory-conventional background. But then Juliet, a distinguished his...

King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra had six children. Of the five who reached maturity, only one, the future King George V, has received much attention from biographers.The eldest son, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, a backward youth and a subject of scandal, died before he was thirty. The three princesses, Louise, Princess Royal and Duchess of Fife, the lifelong spinster Victoria, and Maud, Queen of Norway, were never well-known to the British public during their...

Olivia Cockett was twenty-six years old in the summer of 1939 when she responded to an invitation from Mass Observation to “ordinary” individuals to keep a diary of their everyday lives, attitudes, feelings, and social relations. This book is an annotated, unabridged edition of her candid and evocative diary.Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary 1939-1942 is rooted in the extraordinary milieu of wartime London. Vibrant and engaging, Olivia’s diary reveals her frustration...

This account of British life in the wake of World War I is "social history at its very best . . . insightful and utterly absorbing" ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune).As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people—but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge.For veterans with faces demolished in the tre...

It is the third of September 1939. It is just after half past eleven in the morning. I am fifteen years and sixteen days old. The radiogram at my home, the Woodman Hotel in Clent, has just been switched off, the silence resonates around the room, and a deathly hush has fallen. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, has declared that, despite the best efforts of the politicians of the day to secure 'peace in our time', the inevitable has befallen us; despite pledges to th...

An engaging, wickedly funny and splendidly anecdotal memoir of a career spent among writers, agents, publishers and bookmen and women of every stripe.Jeremy Lewis's first memoir, 'Playing for Time', was hailed by James Lees-Milne as 'the funniest and best written book I've read for years.' His second, 'Kindred Spirits', was described by John Carey as 'sheer pleasure from start to finish'. Now he has written a third autobiographical account of his encounters with literary figures ov...

"A wonderful offbeat memoir.... Holroyd has written perhaps his best book yet."—Ben Macintyre, New York Times Book ReviewRenowned biographer Michael Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd past—guided by old photograph albums, crumbling documents, and his parents' wildly divergent accounts of their lives—gradually yields clues to a constellation of startling events and eccen...