Историческая литература - скачать книги или читать онлайн. Страница 161

#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Laurens returns with a new series that captures the simmering desires and intrigues of early Victorians as only she can.‘Stephanie Laurens’ heroines are marvelous tributes to Georgette Heyer: feisty and strong.’ Cathy KellyRyder Cavanaugh’s step-siblings are determined to make their own marks in London society. Seeking fortune and passion, THE CAVANAUGHS will delight readers with their bold exploits.An independent noblemanLord Randolph Cavanaugh is loyal and devoted—but only to family. To the rest of the world he’s aloof and untouchable, a respected and driven entrepreneur. But Rand yearns for more in life, and when he travels to Buckinghamshire to review a recent investment, he discovers a passionate woman who will challenge his ruthless self-control…A determined ladyFelicia Throgmorton intends to keep her family afloat. For decades, her father was consumed by his inventions and now, months after his death, with their finances in ruins, her brother insists on continuing their father’s tinkering. Felicia is desperate to hold together what’s left of the estate. Then she discovers she must help persuade their latest investor that her father’s follies are a risk worth taking…Together—the perfect teamRand arrives at Throgmorton Hall to discover the invention on which he’s staked his reputation has exploded, the inventor is not who he expected, and a fiercely intelligent woman now holds the key to his future success. But unflinching courage in the face of dismaying hurdles is a trait they share, and Rand and Felicia are forced to act together against dangerous foes to protect everything they hold dear.

The new heartwarming novel from Sunday Times bestselling author, Dilly Court.Clara held onto the precious button, glimmering like a jewel in the dark alleyways of London’s notorious Seven Dials. She needed to save her family… but who was going to save her?There was a time when the Carter sisters’ father was their hero. Now he’s a drunk who’s gambled away everything they had and put them all in peril. It's on Clara's shoulders to save the four sisters from destitution. Clutching her precious button box, the only thing of value they have left, Clara dreams of starting a shop that could put a roof over their heads and keep them safe…But in debt to the terrifying Patches Braggs, leader of one of the East End's roughest gangs, Clara is in fear for her life. When a mysterious benefactor seems to offer an escape, Clara realizes too late that it comes at a terrible price…Cheated, abandoned and alone – can Clara save her family and hold onto her dreams?

A gripping history of the Mediterranean campaigns from the first rumblings of conflict through the Second World War and into the uneasy peace of the late 1940s.The Mediterranean Sea lies at the very heart of recent world history. To the British during the Second World War, the Mediterranean was the world’s great thoroughfare. To the Americans, it represented the answer to anti-imperialism. And to Mussolini, it encapsulated his violent vision of conquest. These three great powers attempted to overthrow the existing order in the Mediterranean, resulting in a collision of allies as well as enemies that hadn’t been seen before: the Germans fought against the Italians, the Americans against the Arabs, the Jews against the British, the French against nearly everyone. The Mediterranean was indeed ‘the bitter sea’.In this masterly history, Simon Ball takes us through the tumultuous events set in motion by Mussolini’s lust for conquest that ended with the creation of Israel. Long drawn-out battles on land, sea and air – dominated by WWII’s most illustrious leaders, Churchill, Eisenhower and Rommel amongst them – resulted in Allied victory in the battle of El Alamein, the terrifying desert campaigns of Africa and the eventual defeat of Italy and then Germany.The wars in the Mediterranean had huge consequences for all those who fought in them, but none more profound than those experienced by the lands, nations and peoples that lived around the sea itself. Based on entirely original research, ‘The Bitter Sea’ is expertly written, utterly compelling and unquestionably important.

Please note that some images were unavailable for the electronic edition.The highly praised biography of an archetypal great house and the family who lived there for over 250 years.‘The Big House’ is the biography of a great country house and the lives of the Sykes family who lived there, with varying fates, for the next two hundred and fifty years. It is a fascinating social history set against the backdrop of a changing England, with a highly individual, pugnacious and self-determining cast, including: ‘Old Tat’ Sykes, said to be one of the great sights of Yorkshire (the author’s great-great-great-grandfather), who wore 18th-century dress to the day of his death at ninety-one in 1861. His son was similarly eccentric, wearing eight coats that he discarded gradually throughout the day in order to keep his body temperature at a constant. He was forced to marry, aged forty-eight, eighteen-year-old Jessica Cavendish-Bentick – a lively and highly intelligent woman who relieved the boredom of her marriage by acquiring a string of lovers, writing novels and throwing extravagant parties (her nickname became ‘Lady Satin Tights’), all the while accumulating debts that ended in a scandalous court case. Their son, Mark, died suddenly whilst brokering the peace settlement at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I; Sledmere was destroyed by fire shortly afterwards.But the rebuilt Sledmere rose from the flames to resound again with colourful, brilliant characters in the 1920s and 1930s including the author’s grandmother, Lily, who had been a celebrated bohemian in Paris.‘The Big House’ is vividly written and meticulously researched using the Sykes’ own family’s papers and photographs. In this splendid biography of place and time, Christopher Simon Sykes has resuscitated the lives of his ancestors and their glorious home from the 18th- through to the 20th-century.

There’s little room in this world for a moral manMeet Early “Trenchmouth“ Taggart, a man born and orphaned in 1903, a man nicknamed for his lifelong oral affliction. His boyhood is shaped by the Widow Dorsett, a strong mountain woman who teaches him to hunt and survive the taunts of others. In the hills of southern West Virginia, a boy grows up fast. Trenchmouth sips moonshine, handles snakes, pleasures women, and masters the rifle – a skill that lands him in the middle of the West Virginia coal wars. A teenaged union sniper, Trenchmouth is exiled to the backwoods of Appalachia’s foothills, where he spends his years running from the past. But trouble will sniff a man down, and an outlaw will eventually run home. Here, Trenchmouth Taggart’s story, like the best ballads, etches its mark deep upon the memory.

An authoritative and entertaining account of the earliest ambassadors, who were at once diplomats, explorers and chroniclers of exotic civilisations.In this book of extraordinary journeys and epochal encounters, Jonathan Wright traces the ambassadors’ story from Ancient Greece and Ashoka’s empire in India to the European Enlightenment and the birth of the nation state. He shows us Byzantine envoys dining with Attila the Hun, 13th-century monks journeying from Flanders to the Asian steppe, and Tudor ambassadors grappling with the chaos of Reformation. He examines the rituals and institutions of diplomacy, asking – for instance – why it was felt necessary to send an elephant from Baghdad to Aachen in 801 A.D. And he explores diplomacy’s dangers, showing us terrified, besieged ambassadors surviving on horsemeat and champagne in 1900s Beijing.Wherever they journeyed, ambassadors reported back on everything they encountered – from moralities and myths to the plants and animals, fashions and foods of the countries in which they found themselves. Exchanging ideas and commodities, they enabled countries and civilisations to get acquainted in sometimes unpredictable ways.Whether discussing the replacement of the roving by the resident ambassador or the subjects of the diplomatic immunity, gift-giving, intelligence-gathering and extraterritoriality, the author has fresh and intriguing things to say. For ambassadors, as much as any conqueror, merchant or explorer, have helped to write the human story.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes’s dazzling portrait of the most exciting period in British history is a groundbreaking achievement.The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook’s first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of discovery – astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical – which together made up this ‘age of wonder’. In this compelling group biography, Richard Holmes tells the stories of the Romantic period’s celebrated innovators and their great scientific discoveries: from telescopic sight to the miner’s lamp, and from the first balloon flight to African exploration.Breathtaking in its originality and storytelling energy, this is a radical vision of the meeting places of science and art, and an extraordinary evocation of an era of exploration and wonder.

The story of the unsung heroines who flew the newest, fastest, aeroplanes in World War II – mostly in southern England where the RAF was desperately short of pilots.Why would the well-bred daughter of a New England factory-owner brave the U-boat blockades of the North Atlantic in the bitter winter of 1941? What made a South African diamond heiress give up her life of house parties and London balls to spend the war in a freezing barracks on the Solent? And why did young Margaret Frost start lying to her father during the Battle of Britain?They – and scores of other women – weren't allowed to fly in combat, but what they did was nearly as dangerous. Unarmed and without instruments or radios, they delivered planes for the Air Transport Auxiliary to the RAF bases from which male pilots flew into battle. At the mercy of the weather and any long-range enemy aircraft that pounced on them, dozens of these women died, among them Amy Johnson, Britain's most famous flyer. But the survivors shared four unrepeatable years of life, adrenaline and love.The story of this 'tough bunch of babes' (in the words of one of them) has never been told properly before. The author has interviewed all the surviving women pilots, who came not just from the shires of England, but also from the U.S.A, Chile, Australia, Poland and Argentina. Paid £ 6.00 a week, they flew – in skirts – up to 16 hours a day in 140 different types of aircraft, though most of them liked spitfires best.

Two sisters. Two special agents. One War.Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice is the incredible true story of British special agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne, two sisters who risked everything to fight for our freedom during the Second World War.The death of an eccentric recluse is rarely an event to be given more than a few lines in a local newspaper. But when, in September 2010, police were called to a tiny, cluttered flat in Torquay and discovered the body of local ‘cat lady’ Eileen Nearne, they also found a small bundle of possessions that told an amazing story.For Eileen Nearne had been an agent for the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, going undercover in Nazi-occupied France to send wireless messages of crucial importance to the Allies. Astonishingly, Eileen was not the only special agent in the family – her sister Jacqueline had also been an SOE. Rarely had two members of the same family sacrificed so much to such dangerous work.Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice pays tribute to these fiercely patriotic women with hearts of courage, who fought for freedom at much personal cost. While Jacqueline narrowly avoided capture several times, tirelessly couriering secret documents for the resistance, Eileen was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo before being incarcerated at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was only 23.This is a true story of triumph and tragedy, of two sisters who sacrificed themselves to defend our freedom, who stood shoulder to shoulder during the darkest of days.

As Queen Catherine’s maid, and daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, the future seems bright for Elizabeth Stafford. But when her father gives her hand to Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, the spirited young woman must sacrifice all for duty. Yet Elizabeth is surprised by her passion for her powerful new husband. And when he takes on a mistress, she is determined to fight for her love and her honour…Naïve and vulnerable, Bess Holland is easily charmed by the Duke of Norfolk, doing his bidding in exchange for gifts and adoration. For years, she and Elizabeth compete for his affections. But they are mere spectators to an obsession neither can rival: Norfolk’s quest to weave the Howard name into the royal bloodline.The women’s loyalties are tested as his schemes unfold – among them the litigious marriage of his niece Anne Boleyn to King Henry VIII. But in an age of ruthless beheadings, no self-serving motive goes unpunished – and Elizabeth and Bess will have to fight a force more sinister than the executioner’s axe…This riveting drama sweeps eight decades and six monarchs. It’s the story of lost innocence, of passion that knows no bounds, and of a man battling an enemy even more formidable than the bloodthirsty Henry VIII: himself.

Perfect for fans of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, this is a remarkable love story with a background of religious and political turmoil in Tudor England.The year is 1527. Hans Holbein makes his first visit to England, sent by the great Erasmus to paint Thomas More, courtier, scholar, patron, and his family. More's splendid house on the river in Chelsea is at the centre of Tudor society, frequented by distinguished astronomers, artists, politicians and men of religion, as well as wards of court, protégés and many others.Two visitors to the great house find themselves irresistibly drawn to Meg Giggs, one of More's foster daughters. John Clement – dark, tall, elegant – studying to be a doctor, is a man of compelling presence and mysterious background. The other man is Holbein himself – warm, ebullient, radical and a painter of great renown. Meg finds herself powerfully drawn to these two wildly contrasting men. She will love one, and marry the other.A wonderful, rich novel, presenting the atmosphere of this Tudor household as rarely achieved, with an astounding ability to present to us the world of Holbein's paintings as well as a gallery of vividly realised characters.

Escapist and completely absorbing, The Villa in Italy is the perfect, mouth-watering summer read.Four very different people are named in a will. All are summoned to the Villa Dante, home of the late Beatrice Malaspina. But who was she?While they wait to find out, the villa begins to work its seductive magic. With its faded frescoes and magnificent mediaeval tower, it’s unlike anywhere they have been before. Slowly, four characters who have gone to great lengths to hide their troubles find that change – and even hope – is possible after all. But the mysterious Beatrice has a devastating secret to reveal that will change everything . . .The perfect holiday read for fans of Rosanna Ley and Rachel Hore, The Villa in Italy is a beautiful evocation of Italy in the aftermath of World War Two.