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Sherman's Wife is Julia Camoys Stonor's blackly humorous childhood memoir. Her mother, Jeanne, came from an impecunious Catholic aristocratic family and careened her way through the bedrooms of Mayfair, Madrid and Rhode Island. Her father was Sherman, the half-American 6th Baron Camoys whom Jeanne effectively blackmailed into marriage. Jeanne insisted that she and Sherman spend their honeymoon with one of her lovers, Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Once installed at the Stonor Park estate, Jeanne set about acquiring money and power through any means possible, including but not limited to theft, sexual blackmail, and murder. In this frank and unflinching portrait of English upper class life in the 1940s, Julia Camoys Stonor manages to evoke Mommie Dearest and Brideshead Revisited in equal measure.
A gripping account of the life and fate of the woman who almost assassinated Benito Mussolini. 7 April 1926: on the steps of the Capitol in Rome, surrounded by chanting Fascists, The Honourable Violet Gibson raises her old revolver and fires at the Italian head of state, Benito Mussolini - the darling of Europe's ruling class. The bullet narrowly misses the dictator's bald head, hitting him in the nose. Of all his would-be assassins, she came closest to changing the course of history. What brought her to this moment? The daughter of an Anglo-Irish lord, she had once consorted with royalty and the peerage. Yet terrible unhappiness lurked beneath that glittering surface. She loved Italy and when Mussolini's thugs took it into the moral cesspit of Fascism, she felt she had to act. She paid for it for the rest of her life, confined to a lunatic asylum, like other difficult women of her class. Frances Stonor Saunders' moving and compulsively readable book rescues this gentle, driven woman from a silent void and restores her dignity and purpose.
In May 1939 Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, a Tory MP, formed an anti-Semitic secret society he called The Right Club. Many of its members were Nazi sympathisers and an inner core were politicians, peers of the realm, prominent socialites and officers in the armed forces. Ramsay recorded their names in a stout, red, leather-bound ledger that was seized by Special Branch in May 1940. It came to be known as The Red Book and its contents are published here in full for the first time. Robin Saikia provides expert analysis of Ramsay's life and times and a full A-Z of Right Club members with illuminating biographies where known. The book highlights the evils of right wing extremism, pointing out t...
During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA's] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA's undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA's astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.