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First published in 1992, this is the story of Frances Donaldson and a wonderfully multi-faceted life. As the daughter of the playwright Frederick Lonsdale, she grew up in the frivolous world of 1920s cafe society, yet she became a committed socialist. As the wife of Lord Donaldson, who was on the board of both London opera houses and was subsequently Minister for the Arts, she was at the centre of cultural life in Britain. Yet for many years she had been a farmer, since, during the Second World War, alone and with no experience, she was determined to make a go of it. Her first two books, both highly successful, were about farming; they were followed by a portrait of Evelyn Waugh, a biography of her father, and biographies of Edward VIII and P.O. Wodehouse, whom she knew as a child. Populated by characters as diverse as Waugh and Frederick Ashton, Tony Crosland and Ann Fleming, this delightful, highly personal memoir reflects the dramatically changing times which have shaped Frances Donaldson's fascinating life.
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No names are dropped for the sake of it. No mad and witty intimacies with the great are vaunted. Few wild parties are attended, despite the eccentric pressures of Frances Donaldson's father, the playwright Frederick Lonsdale, whose personality is one of the book's delights. First published in 1962, in her neat and good-tempered way the author brings alive the attitudes and the atmospheres common to the twenties and thirties. Abetted by her father, she passed through the mill of night-clubs into a faulty marriage, from which she escaped early in the thirties to take part in her second husband's, Jack Donaldson's, heartening social experiment in Peckham. Using the same intelligence that brough...
The first book about the Albatross Press, a Penguin precursor that entered into an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime to keep Anglo-American literature alive under fascism The Albatross Press was, from its beginnings in 1932, a “strange bird”: a cultural outsider to the Third Reich but an economic insider. It was funded by British-Jewish interests. Its director was rumored to work for British intelligence. A precursor to Penguin, it distributed both middlebrow fiction and works by edgier modernist authors such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway to eager continental readers. Yet Albatross printed and sold its paperbacks in English from the heart of Hitler’s Reich. In her original and skillfully researched history, Michele K. Troy reveals how the Nazi regime tolerated Albatross—for both economic and propaganda gains—and how Albatross exploited its insider position to keep Anglo-American books alive under fascism. In so doing, Troy exposes the contradictions in Nazi censorship while offering an engaging detective story, a history, a nuanced analysis of men and motives, and a cautionary tale.
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An account of the Marconi affair, a scandal involving the various British Ministers and the Marconi Company. The Eye-Witness newspaper, founded by Hilaire Belloc, ran a series of articles accusing those involved of corruption in placing the contract and of using the positions to speculate in Marconi shares. The articles were attributed to Cecil Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton's brother, who had succeeded Belloc as editor.