Wyniki wyszukiwania:

'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 divorcee 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...

Astute, witty, and mercifully brief, "Eminent Edwardians" is a portrait of an age. Piers Brendon reveals the essence of the Edwardian era in biographical sketches of four of its most famous figures: Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister and inspirer of the Balfour Declaration on Palestine; Emmeline Pankhurst, dare-devil Suffragette and castrating threat to the lords of humankind; Robert Baden-Powell, war idol and eternal Boy Scout; and grandiose newspaper baron Lord Alfred Northcliffe, who unleashed on an unsuspecting world a mass popular press."

This 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 20th century. The book examines the great powers - USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and Russia - and takes the reader through ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil, when promises of hope grew dim as unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took over. The leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, and others - are examined, not in hindsight, but in the context of their age. The book also...

A comprehensive, scholarly and fascinating study of the end of the British Empire.
No empire has been larger or more diverse than the British Empire. At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves, and a quarter of the earth s surface was coloured red on the map. Where Britain s writ did not run directly, its influence, sustained by matchless industrial and commercial sinews, was often paramount.
Yet no empire (except for the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. Within a generation, this mighty structure sank almost...

A sharp and witty analysis of four characters who have illuminated the age of Elizabeth II: Rupert Murdoch, Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher, and Mick Jagger

Modeled on Lytton Strachey's classic portrayal of eminent Victorians, Piers Brendon's cameo biographies shed dazzling new light on the age of Queen Elizabeth II. All four of his characters have loomed large in the annals of their time. All have aroused controversy in the uttermost corners of the earth, stirring passions as much by personality as by performance. And all have promoted revolt yet championing...