Category: General European Biographies

Albert: Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, social and cultural visionary in his personal correct, used to be born within the saxon duchy of Saxe-Coburg-saalfeld yet outlined the tradition and course of nineteenth-century Britain - an excellent strength on the zenith of its impact - greater than the other British royal or flesh presser. notwithstanding overshadowed in background by way of his adoring spouse, and every now and then mocked through her topics, it was once arguably Albert who gave shape and substance to the Victorian Age.

From the outset, Albert strived to win ‘the admire, the affection and the arrogance of the Queen and of the nation’, pursuing a rare social and cultural campaign that has develop into his maximum legacy. As Chancellor of the collage of Cambridge, he used his place to effectively crusade for extra sleek collage curricula, increasing the topics taught past the normal arithmetic and classics to incorporate smooth heritage and the normal sciences. His organization of the 1851 nice exhibition uncovered British production to the easiest overseas items - and raised an immense surplus which was once later used to set up and extend academic and cultural associations, together with the nice museums nicknamed ‘Albertopolis’ in London. He was once additionally vocal in a few social campaigns - talking out opposed to slavery and the Corn legislation. His philanthropic endeavours - together with the construction of latest and significantly more suitable housing for the bad - won him monstrous acceptance in his followed kingdom, loads in order that he has been credited with saving Britain from the progressive fervour which swept Europe in 1848 and accordingly keeping the British monarchy to the current day.

Very few have made this type of everlasting mark on British society. If anyone individual should be credited for laying the basis of recent Britain, it truly is Albert. Upon Albert’s premature loss of life in 1861, Benjamin Disraeli declared: ‘with Prince Albert we've got buried our sovereign.’ this can be the tale of Albert of Saxe-Coburg: Prince Consort and husband of Queen Victoria, the best of the Victorians and probably the most influential royals of recent Europe.

Henrietta Howard, later Countess of Suffolk, was once the long term mistress and confidante of King George II. She was once additionally, as Tracy Borman's splendidly readable biography unearths, a devoted purchaser of the humanities; a full of life and gifted highbrow in her personal correct; a sufferer of adultery; a passionate suggest for the rights of ladies lengthy ahead of the sunrise of feminism. primarily she used to be a lady of cause in an Age of cause. The mark that this enigmatic and mostly missed royal mistress left at the society and tradition of early Georgian England was once to resonate well past the confines of the court docket, and will nonetheless be felt today.

Searching for Lord Haw-Haw is an authoritative account of the political lives of William Joyce. He grew to become infamous as a fascist, an anti-Semite after which as a moment international battle traitor whilst, assuming the character of Lord Haw-Haw, he acted as a radio propagandist for the Nazis. it's an forever compelling tale of simmering wish, extreme frustration, renewed anticipation and finally catastrophic failure.

This fully-referenced paintings is the 1st try to position Joyce on the centre of the turbulent, annoying and influential occasions by which he lived. It demanding situations current biographies, that have mirrored not just Joyce’s common calculated deceptions but in addition the suspect claims complicated by way of his kinfolk, acquaintances and apologists. by means of exploring his rampant, more and more influential narcissism it additionally deals a pioneering research of Joyce’s character and exposes its harmful, harmful effects.

"What a saga my lifestyles could make!" Joyce wrote from criminal prior to his execution. Few could disagree with him.

A magisterial background of the artists and writers who left Weimar while the Nazis got here to power

In 1933 hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and different competitors of the Nazi regime fled Germany. They have been, within the phrases of Heinrich Mann,”the better of Germany,” refusing to stay voters during this new kingdom that legalized terror and brutality.

Exiled internationally, they expressed the struggle opposed to Nazism in prose, poetry, portray, structure, movie and theater. Weimar in Exile follows those lives, from the increase of nationwide socialism to the go back to their ruined native land, retracing their tales, struggles, setbacks and infrequent victories.

The dignity in exile of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Doblin, Hans Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig etc offers counterpoint to the tale of Germany less than the Nazis.

Patrice Gueniffey, the prime French historian of the innovative and Napoleonic age, takes up the epic narrative on the middle of this turbulent interval: the lifetime of Napoleon himself, from his boyhood in Corsica, to his meteoric upward thrust through the Italian and Egyptian campaigns, to his proclamation as Consul for all times in 1802.

Henry Stuart’s existence is the final nice forgotten Jacobean story. Shadowed via the gravity of the Thirty Years’ struggle and the massive alterations happening throughout Europe in seventeenth-century society, economic climate, politics and empire, his lifestyles used to be visually and verbally gorgeous.

Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales was the desire of england. Eldest son to James VI of Scotland, James I of britain, Henry used to be the epitome of heroic Renaissance princely advantage, his existence set opposed to a interval approximately as wealthy and momentous as any.

Educated to rule, Henry was once attracted to every thing. His court docket used to be awash with top artists, musicians, writers and composers equivalent to Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. He based a royal artwork selection of ecu breadth, accumulated an unlimited selection of precious books, led grand renovations of royal palaces and fastened operatic, hugely politicised masques.

But his pursuits have been even larger. He embraced state-of-the-art technological know-how, funded telescopes and automata, was once buyer of the NorthWest Passage corporation and desired to sail during the limitations of the identified international to discover new continents. He reviewed and modernised Britain’s naval and armed forces potential and in his advocacy for the colonisation of North the United States he helped to rework the world.

At his demise elderly in simple terms eighteen, and contemplating himself to be as a lot a ecu as British, he used to be getting ready to stake his declare to be the following chief of Protestant Christendom within the fight to withstand a resurgent militant Catholicism.

In this wealthy and vigorous booklet, Sarah Fraser seeks to revive Henry to his position in historical past. Set opposed to the bloody traumas of the Thirty Years’ battle, the writing of the King James Bible, the Gunpowder Plot and the darkish tragedies pouring from Shakespeare’s quill, Henry’s existence is the final nice forgotten Jacobean story: the tale of a guy who, had he lived, may need kept Britain from King Charles I, his spaniels and the Civil conflict with its appalling demise his misrule engendered.

Ellen Wilkinson seen herself as a part of a world radical neighborhood and have become keen on socialist, feminist, and pacifist events that spanned the globe. by means of targeting the level to which Wilkinson’s activism transcended Britain’s borders, Laura Beers adjusts our notion of the British Left within the early 20th century.

2008 bricht Francesca Liacopoulos-Fawers Welt zusammen, als ihr Ehemann an Krebs verstirbt. Alle Harmonie, Musik und Liebe verschwinden aus ihrem Leben, übrig bleibt nur eine unbeschreibliche Schwärze. quickly schafft sie es nicht mehr, aus dem tiefen Loch herauszukommen. Da versucht Francescas Schwester sie aus der melancholy zu reißen - und überredet sie, mit ihr auf den Jakobsweg zu gehen. Dort, auf diesem Pilgerweg, wird ihr wundes Herz zum ersten Mal besänftigt und macht erste Schritte in Richtung Heilung.
Während der fifty three Pilgertage vertraut Francesca ihrem Tagebuch ihre Gefühle an.

Stalin’s making a song secret agent follows the impressive lifetime of Nadezhda Plevitskaya, a Russian peasant lady who completed status as considered one of Tsar Nicholas II’s favourite singers and infamy as one in all Stalin’s brokers. Pamela A. Jordan lines Plevitskaya’s existence from her adolescence in an remoted village to nationwide stardom. She continuously declared that she was once top-rated an artist who sang for everyone, despite their ideological leanings or socioeconomic heritage. She claimed all through her occupation to be essentially apolitical, but many years later in Europe, Plevitskaya was once unmasked as one in all Joseph Stalin’s mystery brokers together with her husband, White Russian normal Nikolai Skoblin. Their stories in exile make clear Stalin’s covert operations and the hardships Russian émigrés confronted in interwar Europe, an period of significant political and monetary turmoil.

In addition, this ebook uncovers the jobs that the couple performed in a single of the Soviets’ significant intelligence coups—the 1937 kidnapping of White Russian common Evgeny Miller in Paris. Jordan recreates Plevitskaya’s sensationalized 1938 felony trial within the Palace of Justice, the place she used to be accused of conspiring to kidnap Miller and portrayed as a purple femme fatale. the 1st Western biography of Plevitskaya and the 1st to reconstruct her dramatic trial, this publication offers a desirable window into Soviet-era espionage in interwar Europe.

In 1941 Berek Jakubowicz (now Benjamin Jacobs) was once deported from his Polish village and remained a prisoner of the Reich until eventually the ultimate days of the struggle. His ownership of some dental instruments and rudimentary abilities kept his lifestyles. Jacobs helped gather V1 and V2 rockets in Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau; spent a 12 months and a part in Auschwitz, the place he was once pressured to take away gold enamel from corpses; and survived the RAF assault on 3 ocean liners grew to become legal camps within the Bay of Lubeck. this is often his story.