Eleanor of Aquitaine was the only person ever to sit on the thrones of both France and England. In this account of the turbulent adventures of the extraordinary mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John, author Douglas Boyd takes us into the heart and mind of the woman who changed the shape of Europe for 300 years by marrying Henry of Anjou to make him England's Henry II. Brought up in the comfort- and culture-loving Mediterranean civilisation of southern France, she w...

When Count Henry of Anjou and his formidable wife Eleanor of Aquitaine became king and queen of England, they amassed an empire stretching 1,000 miles from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border, including half of France. Henry’s grandmother Empress Mathilda of Germany had taught him that ruling is like falconry: show the hawk the reward, but take it away at the last moment, to keep the bird eager to please. To sons and vassals alike, Henry promised everything but gave nothing, keeping the th...

A look at the royal women of twelfth-century England—from the empowered to the imprisoned—and their roles in the ruling dynasty.Eleanor of Aquitaine and her second husband, Henry II, are commonly considered medieval figures, but their era was really the violent transition from the Dark Ages, when countries' borders were defined with fire and sword. Henry grabbed the English throne thanks largely to Eleanor's dowry, because she owned one third of France. But their le...

Lore Schindler was ten years old when her dentist father Harry was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His wife Grete bought his release by giving all their possessions to the Nazi state. Leaving Germany with just 10 Marks each, parents and daughter suffered humiliating strip searches at the border. This was the start of Lore's ordeal. In her first French concentration camp, her mother died. Her father also died in another camp. Orphaned and ill ...

An overview of deadly diseases from throughout world history spanning from prehistoric civilizations to the twenty-first century.All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travelers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civilizations died fast, leaving cities undamaged to mystify archeologists. Plague in Athens killed 30% of the population 430–426 BCE. When Roman Emperor Justinian I caught bubonic plague in 541 CE, co...

After the guns fell silent in May 1945, the USSR resumed its clandestine warfare against the western democracies. Stalin installed secret police services in the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Trained by his NKVD officers of the Polish UB, the Czech StB, the Hungarian AVO, Romania's Securitate, Bulgaria's KDS, Albania's Sigurimi and the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic spied on and ruthlessly repressed their fellow citizens on the Soviet model. Wh...

Nearing D-Day, Allied intelligence used thousands of young men hiding in France's forests and hill country to avoid compulsory labour service in Germany as bait to draw German forces away from the Normandy beaches. There are two principles of guerilla warfare: never to concentrate your forces or rish a pitched battle. But with RAF airdrops of pistols and Sten guns came British, American and French liaison officers who concentrated these untrained civilians in remote areas of France. They t...

The toll that both Nazi occupation and Allied liberation took on this northern French region during World War II, told through eyewitness accounts.Famous for Calvados apple brandy and Camembert cheese, Normandy is a green and pleasant land now dotted with thousands of British-owned second homes. Its coastline is also dotted with thousands of indestructible reinforced-concrete bunkers and gun emplacements that formed part of the Atlantic Wall of Hitler's Fortress Eu...

The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet propaganda pretended for several decades that it was 'the will of the people', but in reality the brutal rebellion, which killed millions and raised the numerically tiny Bolshevik Party to power, was made possible by massive injections of German money laundered through a Swedish bank. The so-called 'workers' and peasants' revolution' had a cast of millions, of which the three stars were neither workers nor peas...

Containing previously unpublished material from the Paris and Washington archives, an all new, controversial account of France's role post-World War IIThroughout D-Day, French soliders were mysteriously absent during the invasion on their own soil. Although General Charles De Gaulle commanded 400,000 Free French soldiers, President Roosevelt insisted they not be told the date of the invasion because he intended to occupy France. In doing so, Roosevelt would be able...

Recreating the turbulent life of one of the most exciting women in European medieval history, this biography reveals a peculiarly "modern" queenEleanor of Aquitaine was the only person ever to sit on the thrones of both France and England. This account of the adventures of the extraordinary mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John takes us into the heart and mind of the woman who changed the shape of Europe for 300 years by marrying Henry of Anjou, mak...

Forget the adventure stories of James Bond, Kim Philby, Klaus Fuchs and co. – espionage is not just a boys' game. As long as there has been conflict, there have been female agents behind the scenes. In Belgium and northern France in 1914–18 there were several thousand women actively working against the Kaiser's forces occupying their homelands. In the Second World War, women of many nations opposed the Nazis, risking the firing squad or decapitation by axe or guillotine. Y...