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An absorbing and comprehensive account of the decline of the British Empire.
The 1930s were perhaps the seminal decade in twentieth-century history, a dark time of global depression that displaced millions, paralyzed the liberal democracies, gave rise to totalitarian regimes, and, ultimately, led to the Second World War. In this sweeping history, Piers Brendon brings the tragic, dismal days of the 1930s to life. From Stalinist pogroms to New Deal programs, Brendon re-creates the full scope of a slow international descent towards war. Offering perfect sketches of the players, riveting descriptions of major events and crises, and telling details from everyday life, he offers both a grand, rousing narrative and an intimate portrait of an era that make sense out of the fascinating, complicated, and profoundly influential years of the 1930s.
Quelques pages concerne les Alpes, dont le Simplon.
This illuminating biography of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-75) unravels fully the famous Cornish parson-poet's rich personality. Drawing on a mass of unpublished material, Piers Brendon re-creates one of the most bizarre of Victorian lives, revealing the mixture of truth, over-simplification and falsehood in the legend which has built up around him. The popular account depicts Hawker as a youth of wild high spirits who delighted in hoaxes and practical jokes. As an Oxford undergraduate he won the Newdigate Poetry Prize and married his rich 41-year-old godmother. In 1834 he became vicar of Morwenstow and spent the rest of his life in his desolate country parish on the storm-swept coast of nor...
'After my death,' George V said of his eldest son and heir, 'the boy will ruin himself within twelve months.' The forecast proved uncannily accurate. Edward VIII came to the throne in January 1936, provoked a constitutional crisis by his determination to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, and abdicated in December. He was never crowned king. In choosing the woman he loved over his royal birthright, Edward shook the monarchy to its foundations. Given the new title 'Duke of Windsor' and essentially sent into exile, he remained a visible skeleton in the royal cupboard until his death in 1972 and he haunts the house of Windsor to this day. Drawing on unpublished material, notably correspondence with his most loyal (though much tried) supporter Winston Churchill, Piers Brendon's superb biography traces Edward's tumultuous public and private life from bright young prince to troubled sovereign, from wartime colonial governor to sad but glittering expatriate. With pace and panache, it cuts through the myths that still surround this most controversial of modern British monarchs.
In his account of four figures (Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell), each of them, in their different ways, "monsters," Piers Brendon writes wittily and succinctly--and illuminates an age. Their eminence was global, not just because Britannia ruled the waves, but because they made a lasting international impact: imprinting an indelible media presence on contemporary life; filling the powder-keg which is still the Middle East; leading the emancipation of women; and preparing the younger generation for a world shaped by the ebbing of empire.--From publisher description.
Piers Brendon's magisterial overview of the 1930s is the story of the dark, dishonest decade - child of one world war and parent of the next - that determined the course of the twentieth century. Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and Russia - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil. When Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold. From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine and the American Dust Bowl, to the Moscow metro, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, The Dark Valley brings the 1930's back to life through meticulous scholarship. Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-Tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a vivid chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living then.
In this fascinating and unique biography, Dr Piers Brendon looks deeper into Churchill's love of the animal kingdom, and at how animals played such a large part in his everyday life.
The sun never set upon the British Empire, its critics liked to say, because God didn’t trust the British in the dark. The joke was a backhanded tribute to the astonishing achievement of the inhabitants of small island kingdom off the European mainland. Beginning in the 17th century with a few colonial settlements and trading posts clinging like barnacles to alien shores, and expanding dramatically thereafter by occupation and conquest, they created the greatest empire that the world had ever seen. In its Victorian heyday, when Britannia ruled the waves, it consisted of 58 countries with a population of 400 million. Covering 14 million square miles, or about a quarter of the earth’s surf...
Militærhistorie. Militærbiografi. Om den amerikanske general, hærfører, politiker, statsmand og præsident Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), beskrivelse af hans liv, levnedsløb og militære og politiske karriere. Der er skrevet mange bøger om General Eisenhower, en af de virkelig store hærførere i de Allierede styrker under 2. Verdenskrig, "Ike", som han kaldes af næsten alle, bl.a. fordi han blev et symbol på "the Atlantic Alliance." Den engelske forfatter fordeler bogens hovedvægt ligeligt på Eisenhowers militære og politiske karriere, dvs under og efter 2. Verdenskrig. Bogen er grundig og har et udførligt note- og kildemateriale, samt en oversigt over kodenavne vedrørende operationerne under 2. Verdenskrig.