The Early Years Of Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien/Myles Na Gcopaleen
by Ciaran O'Nuallain
Ciaran O Nuallain's memoir of his brother Brian O'Nolan (1991-66), the only major source on the early life of the man who later achieved literary fame as Flann O'Brien and Mylan na gCopaleen, appears here for the first time in English. First published in Irish as Oige an Dearthar in 1973, it recounts a peripatetic childhood during which the family moved between Strabane, Tullamore and Dublin in consequence of their father's work as a Customs and Excise officer. There are accounts of the brothers...
The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France.'A most strange and compelling book driven by the writer's unsparing search for truth: now an optimistic hunt for a family heroine, now a study in female wiles of survival, now a portrait of one very ordinary person's frailty in the face of terrible odds.' John le Carré When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a box of documents belonging to his late aunt he was completely...
One of the most sought-after criminals of the Depression era, Ralph Fults began his career of crime at the improbable age of 14. At 19, he met Clyde Barrow in a Texas prison, and the two men together founded what would later be known as the Barrow gang. "Running with Bonnie and Clyde" is the story of Fults's experiences in the Texas criminal underworld between the years 1925 and 1935 and the gripping account of his involvement with the Barrow gang, particularly its notorious duo, Bonnie and Clyd...
This carefully researched study of America's greatest showman, huckster, and impresario is both an inclusive analysis of the historical and cultural forces that were the conditions of P. T. Barnum's success, and, as befits its subject, a richly entertaining presentation of the outrageous man and his exploits.
One of the last major untold stories of the war, this is the first-hand account of a conscientious objector born into a famous artistic family who, after the death of his brother on active service, decides to fight the Nazis and joins SOE. Barely 28 years of age he ends up as a leader of French resistance, set up by Jean Moulin, whose horrific death features in the story, and heads a massive underground movement of some 20,000 men.The book has been compiled by Ray Jenkins, a distinguished TV, fi...
The Lifeline: Salomon Grumbach and the Quest for Safety (Brill's Jewish Studies)
by Meredith L Scott
During the first months of World War II, nearly one thousand refugees and asylum seekers held in French internment camps sought the help of one man: Salomon Grumbach. Meredith Scott's The Lifeline is a ground-breaking study of Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew, journalist, and socialist politician who became one of Europe's most important interwar refugee advocates. Focusing on his remarkable life in Germany and France, it uncovers the identities that drove his international crusades for democracy and h...
Christina Rossetti was the youngest of four children. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she suffered the tyranny of a loving family, being restrained by the "police surveillance" of her sister Maria and the goodness of their mother. Although she and her brother Dante Gabriel were known as the "two storms", she curbed her passionate nature, and a love of life was replaced in her work initially by the bitterness of the lonely and ultimately by the conviction of the religious. Comparing her situatio...
The Diary of Samuel Pepys .. (Dover Books on Literature & Drama) (Modern Library)
by Henry Benjamin Wheatley, Samuel Pepys, and Mynors Bright
Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions--until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet. The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic ev...
A daughter's quest to find her father through his work at the intersections of journalism, democracy, and liberalism. Bowen believed telling the right stories with the right words could create a better world. While advancing causes he believed in and lending a voice to the less fortunate, he struggled to provide for his family. Although he made mistakes, his daughter celebrates his ability, even in failure, to maintain bold moral integrity.
William Cooper's passionate struggle against the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the denial of their rights, and his heroic fight for them to become citizens in their own country, has been widely commemorated and celebrated. By carefully reconstructing the historical losses his people suffered and endured, William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story reveals how the first seventy years of Cooper's life inspired the remarkable political work he undertook in the 1930s. Focusing on Cooper's most...
The Education of Henry Adams (Modern Library) (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)
by Henry Adams
Adams was a historian, an intellectual born into the fourth generation of a family of distinguished politicians, diplomats and statesmen that included two presidents of the United States. His "Education" is thus steeped in history, that of his family and of the American politics, culture and identity they helped to shape. At the same time he elaborates his own 'dynamic theory of history' as the product of what he calls the conflict between the Virgin and the Dynamo: 'All the steam in the world c...