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Park Lane
London, 1914. Two young women dream of breaking free from tradition and obligation; they know that suffragettes are on the march and that war looms, but at 35 Park Lane, Lady Masters, head of a dying industrial dynasty, insists that life is about service and duty. Below stairs, housemaid Grace Campbell is struggling. Her family in Carlisle believes she is a high earning secretary, but she has barely managed to get work in service - something she keeps even from her adored brother. Asked to send home more money than she earns, Grace is in trouble. As third housemaid she waits on Miss Beatrice, the youngest daughter of the house, who, fatigued with the social season, is increasingly drawn into...
The Bolter
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year An O, The Oprah Magazine #1 Terrific Read In an age of bolters—women who broke the rules and fled their marriages—Idina Sackville was the most celebrated of them all. Her relentless affairs, wild sex parties, and brazen flaunting of convention shocked high society and inspired countless writers and artists, from Nancy Mitford to Greta Garbo. But Idina’s compelling charm masked the pain of betrayal and heartbreak. Now Frances Osborne explores the life of Idina, her enigmatic great-grandmother, using letters, diaries, and family legend, following her from Edwardian London to the hills of Kenya, where she reigned over the scandalous antics of the “Happy Valley Set.” Dazzlingly chic yet warmly intimate, The Bolter is a fascinating look at a woman whose energy still burns bright almost a century later.
Lilla's Feast
Lilla Eckford, interned in a Japanese civilian camp in China during the second world war after an extraordinary early life,passed her time by compiling a book about the joys of food.Thisprecious cookery book, now in the possession of the ImperialWarMuseum, inspired Lilla's great-granddaughter, Frances Osborne, to investigate her enthralling story. Lilla's Feast spans the world from China to India and finally to England over a hundred years, and blends together personal history, world events, period atmosphere and family anecdotes into a brilliantly vibrant and poignant story.
The Temptress
In Kenya's 'Happy Valley' in the years spanning the 1920s to the 1940s no one paid too much attention to the privileged colonial set as they farmed their estates, partied until dawn and indulged in extra-marital affairs. Not until Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was shot dead at the wheel of his Buick in the early hours of 24 January 1941. Some said the good-looking womaniser had it coming. He was a philanderer who could have had any number of enemies among cuckolded husbands who wanted revenge. Ageing Jock Delves Broughton stood trial for Erroll's murder but was acquitted and the mystery remained unsolved - until now. American heiress Alice de Janzé had been conducting a clandestine affair wi...
Diary of an MP's Wife
Sunday Times Political Book of the Year A Book of the Year in the New Statesman, Financial Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Mail on Sunday and The Times 'They're the wickedest political diaries since Alan Clark's' Daily Mail 'Riotously candid' Decca Aitkenhead, Sunday Times What is it like to be a wife of a politician in modern-day Britain? Sasha Swire finally lifts the lid. For more than twenty years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade. A professional partner and loyal spouse, Swire has strong political opinions herself - sometimes more 'No, Minister' than ...
The Bolter
* 'This is a truly astonishing book. Frances Osborne has not just brought to life a dizzyingly rich and scandalous slice of social history, she has produced a tragic and deeply moving tale as well. It is far more gripping than any novel I have read for ye
The Ghosts of Happy Valley
Happy Valley was the name given to the Wanjohi Valley in the Kenya Highlands, where a small community of affluent, hedonistic white expatriates settled between the wars. While Kenya's early colonial days have been immortalised by farming pioneers like Lord Delamere and Karen Blixen, and the pioneering aviator Beryl Markham, Happy Valley became infamous under the influence of troubled socialite, Lady Idina Sackville, whose life was told in Frances Osborne's bestselling The Bolter. The era culminated with the notorious murder of the Earl of Erroll in 1941, the investigation of which laid bare the Happy Valley set's decadence and irresponsibility, chronicled in another bestseller, James Fox's W...
On Brick Lane
On Brick Lane is a journey into the heart of the East End, an excavation of past, memory, place and people. By looking at a single street, Rachel Lichtenstein teases out the story of one of London's most vibrant and dynamic communities. It is a story of immigration - of Huguenots, Jews, Bangladeshis; of anarchists and fascists; of abandoned synagogues, teeming mosques and incongruent Hawksmoor churches; of gangsters and artists; shopkeepers and street life; the beating heart of a never-still, always-vocal people. With Lichtenstein's skilful guidance, it becomes a trip through a world that is at once recognizable, but also wonderfully stange.
Hidden Lives
Margaret Forster's grandmother died in 1936, taking many secrets to her grave. Where had she spent the first 23 years of her life? Who was the woman in black who paid her a mysterious visit shortly before her death? How had she borne living so close to an illegitimate daughter without acknowledging her? The search for answers took Margaret on a journey into her family’s past, examining not only her grandmother's life, but also her mother’s and her own. The result is both a moving, evocative memoir and a fascinating commentary on how women’s lives have changed over the past century.
White Mischief
Just before 3am on January 24th, 1941, when Britain was preoccupied with surviving the Blitz, the body of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was discovered lying on the floor of his Buick, at a road intersection some miles outside Nairobi, with a bullet in his head. A leading figure in Kenya's colonial community, the Earl had recently been appointed Military Secretary, but he was primarily a seducer of other men's wives. Sir Henry Delves Broughton, whose wife was Erroll's current conquest, had an obvious motive for the murder, but no one was ever convicted and the question of who killed him became a classic mystery, a scandal and cause celebre. Among those who became fascinated with the Erroll case was Cyril Connolly who joined up with James Fox for a major investigation of the case in 1969 for the Sunday Times magazine. After his death James Fox inherited the obsession and a commitment to continue in pursuit of the story both in England and Kenya in the late 1970s. One day, on a veranda overlooking the Indian Ocean, Fox came across a piece of evidence that seemed to bring all the fragments and pieces together and convinced him that he saw a complete picture...
