Download or read book Murder at Wrotham Hill written by Diana Souhami and published by riverrun. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dagmar, a gentle, eccentric spinster, was the embodiment of Austerity Britain's prudence and thrift. Her murderer Harold Hagger, with his litany of petty crimes, abandoned wives, sloughed-off identities and army desertions, was its opposite. With their characters so indelibly marked, their tragic meeting seemed in some way destined. Featuring England's first celebrity policeman, Fabian of the Yard, the celebrated forensic scientist, Keith Simpson, and history's most famous and dedicated hangman, Albert Pierrepoint.
Download or read book Murder at Wrotham Hill Proof written by Diana Souhami and published by . This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wild Girls written by Diana Souhami and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-04-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild Girls is the critically acclaimed true story of two wealthy American heiresses---one an artist, the other a writer---whose stormy, passionate love affair captivated Paris’s salon set between the wars. Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks were rich, American, eccentric, and grandly lesbian. They met in Paris in 1915, and their relationship lasted more than fifty years, despite infidelity, separation, and temperamental differences. Romaine Brooks, a painter, was the product of an unhappy childhood and trusted no one but Natalie. Natalie Barney was passionate about life, sex, and love. Her Friday afternoon salons, attended by Gertrude Stein, and Colette and Edith Sitwell, were a magnet for social introductions and cultural innovations. Drawing from letters, papers, and paintings, Diana Souhami, the award-winning author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, re-creates the lives and loves of this pair of dazzling and wild women. “Epic romance . . . smartly sex-positive and so good-naturedly shocking.” ---The New York Times Book Review “Real tenderness and pathos . . . not only entertaining but affecting reading.” ---The Washington Post “Their friends were the most bohemian, their parties the most risqué, their tortured love affair the most notorious in Europe. Diana Souhami tells a remarkable tale.” ---The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Download or read book The Trials of Radclyffe Hall written by Diana Souhami and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diana Souhami’s Lambda Award–winning biography is a fascinating look at one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing lesbian literary figures. Born in 1880, Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was a young unwanted child when her parents put an end to their tempestuous marriage by filing for divorce. She had already made tentative forays into lesbian love when her father died, leaving her an heiress at eighteen. Her income assured, Hall moved out of her mother’s house, renamed herself John in honor of her great-great-grandfather, and divided her time among hunting, traveling, and pursuing women. She began to write—songs, poetry, prose, and short stories—and achieved success as a novelist, but it was with the publication of The Well of Loneliness in 1928 that Radclyffe Hall became an internationally known figure. Dubbed the “bible of lesbianism,” the book caused a scandal on both sides of the Atlantic. Though moralistic in tone, because of its subject matter it was tried as obscene in America and in the United Kingdom, where it was censored under the Obscene Publications Act. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall is a fascinating, no-holds-barred account of the life of this controversial woman, including her torrid relationship with the married artist Una Troubridge, who was Hall’s devoted partner for twenty-eight years.
Download or read book Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter written by Diana Souhami and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Keppel, the married lover of Queen Victoria's eldest son and great-grandmother to Camilla Parker-Bowles, was a key figure in Edwardian society. Hers was the acceptable face of adultery. Discretion was her hallmark. It was her art to be the king's mistress and yet to laud the Royal Family and the institution of marriage. Formidable and manipulative, her attentions to the king brought her wealth, power, and status. Her daughter Violet Trefusis had a long tempestuous affair with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, during which Vita left her husband and two sons to travel abroad with Violet. It was a liaison that threatened the fabric of Violet's social world, and her passion and recalcitrance in pursuit of it pitted her against her mother and society. From memoirs, diaries, and letters, Diana Souhami portrays this fascinating and intense mother/daughter relationship in Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Her story of these women, their lovers, and their lovers' mothers, highlights Edwardian - and contemporary - duplicity and double standards and goes to the heart of questions about sexual freedoms.
Download or read book Women s Lives and Clothes in WW2 written by Lucy Adlington and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-10-30 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated history of World War II-era women’s fashions, featuring ladies from all nations involved in conflict. What would you wear to war? How would you dress for a winter mission in the open cockpit of a Russian bomber plane? At a fashion show in Occupied Paris? Singing in Harlem, or on fire watch in Tokyo? Women’s Lives and Clothes in WW2 is a unique, illustrated insight into the experiences of women worldwide during World War II and its aftermath. The history of ten tumultuous years is reflected in clothes, fashion, accessories, and uniforms. As housewives, fighters, fashion designers, or spies, women dressed the part when they took up their wartime roles. Attractive to a general reader as well as a specialist, Women’s Lives and Clothes in WW2 focuses on the experiences of British women, then expands to encompass every continent affected by war. Woven through all cultures and countries are common threads of service, survival, resistance, and emotion. Historian Lucy Adlington draws on interviews with wartime women, as well as her own archives and costume collection. Well-known names and famous exploits are featured—alongside many never-before-told stories of quiet heroism. You’ll indulge in luxury fashion, bridal ensembles, and enticing lingerie, as well as thrifty make-do-and-mend. You’ll learn which essential garments to wear when enduring a bomb raid and how a few scraps of clothing will keep you feeling human in a concentration camp. Women's Lives and Clothes in WW2 is richly illustrated throughout, with many previously unpublished photographs, 1940s costumes, and fabulous fashion images. History has never been better dressed.
Download or read book Gwendolen written by Diana Souhami and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A bold feat of imagination . . . . Intriguing and moving: a fictional recovery of the woman's interior experience . . . and a powerful meditation upon the nature of creativity. Both an arresting interpretation of George Eliot's work and a compelling fiction in its own right." —Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch In an astonishing unsent love letter, a 19th-century Englishwoman looks back at her formative years, when she fell in love with one man but married another—the richest bidder—to save her family Gwendolen Harleth, an exceptionally beautiful upper-class Englishwoman, is gambling boldly at a resort when she catches the eye of a handsome, pensive gentleman. His gaze unnerves her, and she loses her winnings. The next day, she learns that her widowed mother and younger sisters, for whom she is financially responsible, have lost their family's fortune. As a young woman in the 1860s with only her looks to serve her, Gwendolen's options are few, so when Henleigh Grandcourt, a wealthy aristocrat, proposes to her, she accepts, despite her discovery of an alarming secret about his past. During their marriage, Grandcourt is psychologically and physically brutal to her, shattering her confidence. Gwendolen begins to encounter the alluring gentleman from the resort—Daniel Deronda—in her social circles, but Grandcourt, cold and calculating, takes pains to isolate her from everything she loves. Gwendolen's desperation nearly overcomes her, until an unexpected turn of events suddenly liberates her from Grandcourt's tyranny and leaves her financially independent. Newly free, but riddled with insecurity and desire, Gwendolen must take painful steps to shape a life that has not gone according to plan. Gwendolen and her world, originally creations of George Eliot, are inhabited and brought to sympathetic and nuanced life in this irresistible debut novel by Diana Souhami, an award-winning British biographer.
Download or read book Stitches in Time written by Lucy Adlington and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Riffling through the wardrobes of years gone by, costume historian Lucy Adlington reveals the rich stories underlying the clothes we wear in this stylish tour of the most important developments in the history of fashion, from ancient times to the present day. Starting with underwear – did you know Elizabeth I owned just one pair of drawers, worn only after her death? – she moves garment by garment through Western attire, exploring both the items we still wear every day and those that have gone the way of the dodo (sugared petticoats, farthingales and spatterdashers to name but a few). Beautifully illustrated throughout, and crammed with fascinating and eminently quotable facts, Stitches in Time shows how the way we dress is inextricably bound up with considerations of aesthetics, sex, gender, class and lifestyle – and offers us the chance to truly appreciate the extraordinary qualities of these, our most ordinary possessions.
Download or read book Gluck written by Diana Souhami and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diana Souhami’s critically acclaimed biography of lesbian painter Hannah Gluckstein—the woman, the artist, the legend To her family, Hannah Gluckstein was known as Hig. To Edith Shackleton Heald, the journalist with whom she lived for almost forty years, she was Dearest Grub. And to the art world, she was simply Gluck. She was born in 1895 into a life of privilege. Her family had founded J. Lyons & Co., a vast catering empire. From the beginning Gluck was a rebel. At a time when only men wore trousers, she scandalized society with her masculine clothing—though she always dressed with style and turned androgyny into high fashion. Her affairs with high-profile women shocked her conservative family, even while she achieved fame as an artist. During the 1920s and thirties, Gluck’s paintings—portraits, flowers, and landscapes, presented in frames designed and patented by her—were the toast of the town. At the height of her success, when wounded in love, her own obsessions caused her to fade for decades from the public eye, but then, at nearly eighty, her return to the spotlight ensured her immortality.
Download or read book Little Book of Murder written by Neil Storey and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Little Book of Murder is a chilling compendium of intriguing, obscure and strange facts and trivia about murders and murderers from around the world. From infamous cases and serial killers, to unusual murder weapons and crime scene investigations, this book is sure to make you sit up and say, ‘I never knew that!’A reference book and a quirky guide, this volume can be dipped in to time and time again to reveal something new about the murderers, the victims, the people who write about crime, and the advances in scientific detection. A remarkably engaging little book, this is essential reading for true crime and crime fiction fans alike.
Download or read book Edith Cavell written by Diana Souhami and published by Quercus. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edith Cavell was born on 4th December 1865, daughter of the vicar of Swardeston in Norfolk, and shot in Brussels on 12th October 1915 by the Germans for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border. Following a traditional village childhood in 19th century England, Edith worked as a governess in the UK and abroad, before training as a nurse in London in 1895. To Edith, nursing was a duty, a vocation, but above all a service. By 1907, she had travelled most of Europe and become matron of her own hospital in Belgium, where, under her leadership, a ramshackle hospital with few staff and little organization became a model nursing school. When war broke out, Edith helped soldiers to escape the war by giving them jobs in her hospital, finding clothing and organizing safe passage into Holland. In all, she assisted over two hundred men. When her secret work was discovered, Edith was put on trial and sentenced to death by firing squad. She uttered only 130 words in her defense. A devout Christian, the evening before her death, she asked to be remembered as a nurse, not a hero or a martyr, and prayed to be fit for heaven. When news of Edith's death reached Britain, army recruitment doubled. After the war, Edith's body was returned to the UK by train and every station through which the coffin passed was crowded with mourners. Diana Souhami brings one of the Great War's finest heroes to life in this biography of a hardworking, courageous and independent woman.
Download or read book The Invention of Murder written by Judith Flanders and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Superb... Flanders's convincing and smart synthesis of the evolution of an official police force, fictional detectives, and real-life cause célèbres will appeal to devotees of true crime and detective fiction alike." -Publishers Weekly, starred review In this fascinating exploration of murder in nineteenth century England, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction Murder in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with cold-blooded killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera, and melodrama-even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts. Detective fiction and the new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other-the founders of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens's Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell. In this meticulously researched and engrossing book, Judith Flanders retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder in Great Britain, both famous and obscure: from Greenacre, who transported his dismembered fiancée around town by omnibus, to Burke and Hare's bodysnatching business in Edinburgh; from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, to the tragedy of the murdered Marr family in London's East End. Through these stories of murder-from the brutal to the pathetic-Flanders builds a rich and multi-faceted portrait of Victorian society in Great Britain. With an irresistible cast of swindlers, forgers, and poisoners, the mad, the bad and the utterly dangerous, The Invention of Murder is both a mesmerizing tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable.
Download or read book No Modernism Without Lesbians written by Diana Souhami and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sunday Times Book of the Year Winner of the Polari Prize 'A book about love, identity, acceptance and the freedom to write, paint, compose and wear corduroy breeches with gaiters. To swear, kiss, publish and be damned. It is vastly entertaining and often moving... There isn't a page without an entertaining vignette' The Times. The extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, Between the Wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves their stories into those of the four central women to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-War Paris. 'One of the best books I've read this year.' James Bridle
Download or read book Selkirk s Island written by Diana Souhami and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Alexander Selkirk was abandoned by his shipmates on the remote island of Juan Fernandez in 1704 he could not have know that he wouldn't see another human soul for four long years, could not have anticipated the lonely and fierce existence to which he had been condemned, nor could he have ever guessed that his plight - recreated in the form of Robinson Crusoe - would be immortalised by Daniel Defoe. In this startlingly original book, award-winning author Diana Souhami brings new life to this story, evoking the abandoned sailor's struggle with solitude, God and the savage new home into which he had been so brutally thrust.
Download or read book A Different Class of Murder written by Laura Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Sensational. The most minutely researched and brilliantly told account ever' MAIL ON SUNDAY. Laura Thompson re-examines the truths behind one of post-war Britain's most notorious murders: the bludgeoning to death of nanny Sandra Rivett in a Belgravia basement on 7 November 1974. Lord Lucan, found guilty of the murder, was only granted a death certificate in 2016. His wife Veronica – last surviving participant in this dark episode – died in September 2017. In this revised edition, Laura Thompson sheds new light on the volatile mental state of Veronica Lucan, and on the theories surrounding the murder, to which she adds a new, extraordinary and shocking possibility.
Download or read book The Death of Grass written by John Christopher and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought experiment in future-shock survivalism' Robert MacFarlane 'Gripping ... of all science fiction's apocalypses, this is one of the most haunting' Financial Times WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE A post-apocalyptic vision of the world pushed to the brink by famine, John Christopher's science fiction masterpiece The Death of Grass includes an introduction by Robert MacFarlane in Penguin Modern Classics. At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain, society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother's farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits. A chilling psychological thriller and one of the greatest post-apocalyptic novels ever written, The Death of Grass shows people struggling to hold on to their identities as the familiar world disintegrates - and the terrible price they must pay for surviving. John Christopher (1922-2012) was the pen name of Samuel Youd, a prolific writer of science fiction. His novels were popular during the 1950s and 1960s, most notably The Death Of Grass (1956), The World in Winter (1962), and Wrinkle in the Skin (1965), all works depicting ordinary people struggling in the midst of apocalyptic catastrophes. In 1966 he started writing science-fiction for adolescents; The Tripods trilogy, the Prince in Waiting trilogy (also known as the Sword of the Spirits trilogy) and The Lotus Caves are still widely read today. Ifyou enjoyed The Death of Grass, you might like John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
Download or read book Kent Murders and Misdemeanours written by Margaret Woodhams and published by . This book was released on 2025-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kent is the largest and most heavily populated of the home counties. It is a county of contrasts, in the north and west it borders London and its population there has moved to and from the metropolis for centuries, but it is also known for agricultural produce and heavy industries including coal mining, as well as historic towns and cities such as Canterbury. Kent's history has been shaped by its extensive coastline and today people and goods still transit through the county from its chief port of Dover. Kent was famous for the number of smuggling gangs who plied their trade on its coastline in the 18th and 19th centuries including the Hawkhurst Gang and the Romney Marsh Gang. Other crimes in the day included the Train Robbery of 1855 and an attack on Charles Dickens by two rogues in 1862. There are a number of infamous murders linked to the county, such as Alphege, Becket and Arden of Faversham, the latter made famous in the play of the same name. The 19th century saw the unsolved murder of the Bonars in Chislehurst, the cruel murder by neglect of a wife and child in the Cudham of 1877, the death of a soldier in Bossenden Woods by Mad Thom and the death by opium of Dr Lyddon in Faversham in 1890. The murderer of Ightham's Caroline Luard in 1908 remains unsolved and the 1946 Wrotham Hill murder still resonates today. In more recent times, the Krays spent time in Canterbury Prison, and the notorious criminal and murderer Kenneth Noye lived in the county. Kent was also briefly the home of serial killer Peter Tobin. This collection of true-life crime stories gives a vivid insight into life in Kent through the centuries to the present. This book will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of crime as well as those who want to know more about the history of this county in the South East of England.
