In this riveting and extensively researched account, Peter Conradi the celebrated author of The Kings Speech, on which the Oscar award-winning film of the same name was based offers an uncompromising portrayal of Europes royals and reveals the scandals, excesses, conflicts and interests hidden behind the pomp of the ceremonial garb and the grandeur of official functions.At a time when Western society appears to be demanding more equality and democracy, peoples fascination with monarchies s...

By the time he was brought to trial in 1992, Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had killed more than fifty women and children, often sexually abusing them and leaving their bodies mutilated beyond recognition. Although he was initially arrested in 1984, the police lacked enough evidence to pin the unsolved murders on him and he was able to torture and kill dozens more before his eventual conviction. Compiling exclusive interviews and trial transcripts, journalist and editor at London's ...

The King's Speech was written by London Sunday Times journalist Peter Conradi and Mark Logue—grandson of Lionel Logue, whose recently discovered diaries and correspondence contain fascinating details about these true events.At the urging of his wife, Elizabeth, the Duke of York (known to the royal family as "Bertie") began to see speech therapist Lionel Logue in a desperate bid to cure his lifelong stammer. Little did the two men know that this unlikely friendship...

How do you 'prepare' for bereavement? Religious faith can help, as can ritualised codes of dress and behaviour that recognise different stages of mourning. But many of us feel singularly unprepared when we lose someone. No one 'theory' can sooth the bereaved, precisely because grief so strips us naked and profoundly wounds us. Nothing pre-cooked helps. No quick fix, no one-shot deal.In this inspirational book, Peter J Conradi draws on literature, history and philosophy to ...

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...

One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century - amazingly he was an almost unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist called Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed 'The Quack who saved a King'.Logue wasn't a British aristocrat or even an Englishman - he was a commoner and an Australian to boot. Nevertheless it was the outgoing, amiable Logue who single-handedly turned the famously nervous, tongue-tied, Duke of York ...

‘A must read for anyone interested in the future of Europe and the world as a whole.’ Serhii Plokhy, author of The Last EmpireAn essential insight into Russia’s relations with Ukraine, the US and beyondWhy did Vladimir Putin launch his devastating attack on Ukraine in February 2022? And is Western policy towards Russia to blame for the bloodiest war on European soil since 1945? Peter Conradi, Europe Editor of the Sunday Times

John Fowles had gained great popularity as a contemporary novelist on both sides of the Atlantic. In this comprehensive study of his work, originally published in 1982, Peter Conradi relates his work to his life, his ideas and his place in contemporary English fiction at the time. Conradi sees him as both realist and experimental, and in detailed analyses of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman illuminates Fowles’s use of literary genres – the romance (in particula...

The broadcast that George VI made to the British nation on the outbreak of war in September 1939—which formed the climax of the multi-Oscar-winning film The King's Speech—was the product of years of hard work with Lionel Logue, his iconoclastic, Australian-born speech therapist. Yet the relationship between the two men did not end there. Far from it: in the years that followed, Logue was to play an even more important role at the monarch's side.The King's War follows that relationship thro...

Peter J. Conradi's memoir Family Business includes a cast of characters ranging from his European Jewish forebears who came to Britain in the Victorian era to influential novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, whose biography Conradi himself wrote. The arc of Conradi's story travels, unusually, from the relative integration of his ancestors to his rebellion against this and his long association with Murdoch, another outsider in English society.Against the upwardly mobile s...

Following the New York Times bestselling The King’s Speech, this eagerly anticipated sequel takes King George VI and his confidant and speech therapist Lionel Logue into the darkest days of World War II.The broadcast that George VI made to the British nation on the outbreak of war in September 1939—which formed the climax of the multi-Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech—was the product of years of hard work with Lionel Logue, his iconoclastic, Australian-born speech therapist. Yet...

These never before published writings comprise Iris Murdoch's passionate wartime correspondence with two early intimates: the poet Frank Thompson, brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, who was killed in 1944, and David Hicks, with whom she had a dramatic affair, engagement, and breakup. It also includes the journal that Murdoch kept as a touring actress during August of 1939. The selection sheds new light on a brilliant young mind ("sharp and polished as a sword" as Frances Wilson descri...