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Biography
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Title: Jeanie, an Army of One
Author: Sybil Oldfield
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Price: £17.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Emancipation of Women
Category: Biography |
This first full biography of Mrs. Nassau Senior, 1822-1877, tells how an extraordinary woman escaped from the constraints of Victorian domesticity to become the first woman in Whitehall and one of Britain's great social reformers. An ardent Christian Socialist radical, like her brother Thomas Hughes (author of "Tom Brown's Schooldays"), Jeanie Senior pioneered social work with Octavia Hill, co-founded the British Red Cross in the Franco-Prussian war and battled as 'Government Inspector' on behalf of exploited Workhouse girls. She was ferociously attacked for advocating the fostering of all pauper orphans rather than their incarceration and for indicting Workhouse 'Barrack' schools for producing prostitution fodder. Her fight to defend her findings against male hostility politicised her and she became an icon for the late 19th century women's movement. Jeanie Senior was also a significant figure in the worlds of art, music and literature, even being, it is argued here, the vital inspiration for her friend George Eliot in creating Dorothea, heroine of Middlemarch. Her life was a great 'human story' as she struggled in the teeth of multiple bereavement, an unhappy marriage and cancer in order to rescue others more desperate and vulnerable still. Florence Nightingale told her she had been 'a noble Army of one' and later grieved that her 'premature death was a national and irreparable loss'.
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Title: Jottings of a Young Sailor
Author: Norman Sparksman
Publisher: Melrose Books
Price: £12.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Royal Navy
Category: Biography |
One of the main functions of the Royal Navy during World War II was to defend from enemy attack Allied merchant shipping carrying vital war supplies to and from the United Kingdom. This it did in two ways. Firstly, it organised merchant ships into convoys escorted by a protective screen of warships and secondly by arming the merchant ships themselves so that they had some means of self defence. This book is an account of Norman Sparksman's experiences whilst serving in the Royal Navy. Firstly as a seaman during his officer training programme on HMS Edinburgh escorting convoys to the Russian Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel; and later, having been commissioned, serving in the branch of the Navy responsible for the arming of merchant ships.Surviving the loss of his ship in action while defending an Arctic convoy and the privations of an enforced two month stay in primitive conditions on the desolate snowbound North coast of Russia he then had to face the perilous voyage back to the UK on a destroyer sailing independently with no means of help in the event of mishap. Having arrived home safely the author completed his officer training at HMS King Alfred and the Royal Naval College Greenwich. He was then posted to the convoy assembly point in Belfast Lough to assist with the arming of the merchant ships assembling there for convoy. In April 1945 he was posted to the busy port of Calcutta in India, again to assist in the servicing of defensively equipped merchant ships. Demobilised in August 1946, the author returned home to civilian life. No more dodging bombs and shells. No more wondering if a torpedo would dispatch him to the next world.
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Title: Digging up the Dead
Author: Druin Burgh
Publisher: Vintage
Price: £8.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Astley Cooper
Category: Biography |
A tearaway young man from Norfolk, Astley Cooper (1768–1841) became the world’s richest and most famous surgeon. Admired from afar by the Brontës and up close by his student Keats, his success was born of an appetite for bloody revolutions. He set up an international network of bodysnatchers, won the Royal Society’s highest prize and boasted to Parliament that there was no one whose body he could not steal. Experimenting on his neighbours’ corpses and the living bodies of their stolen pets, his discoveries were as great as his infamy. Caught up in the French Revolution, and in attempts to bring radical democracy to Britain, Cooper nevertheless rose to become surgeon to royals from the Prince Regent to Queen Victoria. Setting the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry, Burch’s Digging Up the Dead is a riveting account of a world of gothic horror as well as fertile idealism. |
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Title: Moonless Night
Author: Jimmy James
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Price: £14.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Jimmy James
Category: Biography |
From the moment he was shot down to the final whistle, Jimmy James' one aim as a POW of the Germans was to escape. The Great Escaper describes his experiences and those of his fellow prisoners in the most gripping and thrilling manner. The author made more than 12 escape attempts including his participation in The Great Escape, where 50 of the 76 escapees were executed in cold blood on Hitler's orders. On re-capture, James was sent to the infamous Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp where, undeterred, he tunnelled out. That was not the end of his remarkable story. Moonless Night has strong claim to be the finest escape story of the Second World War.
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Title: The Dambuster Who Cracked the Dam
Author: Arthur G. Thorning
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Price: £19.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Melvin Young
Category: Biography |
On 25 September 1939 Melvin Young reported to No.1 Initial Training Unit. He was selected as a bomber pilot and promoted to Flying Officer. Having undertaken a Lancaster conversion course Melvin and his new crew were posted to 57 Squadron at Scampton - soon to become 617 Squadron. On 15 May the Order for Operation Chastise was issued - the raid to be flown the next night, 16/17 May. The plan for the operation was that three waves of aircraft would be employed. The first wave of nine aircraft, led by Gibson, would first attack the Mohne Dam, then the Eder followed by other targets as directed by wireless from 5 Group HQ if any weapons were still available. This wave would fly in three sections of three aircraft about ten minutes apart led by Guy Gibson, Melvin Young and Henry Maudslay. At 00.43 Melvin and his crew made their attempt on the Mohne dam. Gibson recorded that Young's weapon made 'three good bounces and contact'.Once the dam had been breached Gibson with Melvin as his deputy led the three remaining armed aircraft towards the Eder Dam. On the return trip Melvin Young and his crew fell victim to enemy guns.
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Title: Ice Cream & Goffa
Author: Alan Diffey
Publisher: Melrose Books
Price: £12.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Royal Navy
Category: Biography
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Allan Diffey s charming and amusing memoir portrays a long lost era of the Royal Navy in the 1950s, and one boy s love for ships and the sea. Diffey had never seen the sea until he was five years old, having been born just after the outbreak of the Second World War, and evacuated to Andover after his family s house in Gosport was bombed. On leaving school aged only fourteen, Allan was employed by the N.A.A.F.I. Institute and for the next two years delivered Ration Stores to all the small R.N. Craft that were based in Portsmouth Dockyard, and to H.M.S. Vernon. At the age of seventeen Allan became eligible to serve on sea going R.N. ships in a civilian capacity in the Ships Canteen and Goffa Bar whereon five days after his seventeenth birthday he was drafted to his first R.N. ship, H.M.S. Kenya. Allan relates his memoirs in a very simple manner as he recalls an era that was fast coming to an end of R.N. ships, the like of which we shall not see again. This book is a fascinating snapshot of Naval History from a civilian prospective.
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Title: Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart
Author: Anka Muhlstein
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Price: £18.00
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Elizabeth I
Category: Biography |
In this major new double biography, Anka Muhlstein examines the turbulent relationship between Elizabeth I of England and Mary, Queen of Scots. At this time, quite uniquely, both the thrones of the British Isles were occupied by women, which for the first time brought the issue of royal consorts to the fore. The story of these two queens is one of the most fascinating in British history.
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Title: Thomas Carlyle
Author: John Morrow
Publisher: Continuum
Price: £14.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Thomas Carlyle
Category: Biography |
Thomas Carlyle was a major figure in Victorian literature and a unique commentator on nineteenth-century life. Born in humble circumstances in the Scottish village of Ecclefechan in 1795, his rise to fame was marked by fierce determination and the development of a highly distinctive literary voice. In this clear, authoritative and readable biography, John Morrow traces Carlyle's personal and intellectual career. Wide-ranging, prophetic and invariably challenging, his work ranged from the astonishing pseudo-autobiography "Sartor Resartus" to major historical works on the French Revolution and "Frederick the Great", and to radical political manifestos such as "Latter Day Pamphlets". "Thomas Carlyle" is an account of his work and of his life, including celebrity as the Sage of Chelsea and his tempestuous marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle. |
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Title: Nature's Engraver
Author: Jenny Uglow
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Price: £9.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Thomas Bewick
Category: Biography
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Award-winning biographer Jenny Uglow follows-up books on Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and the Lunar Society with the life of Thomas Bewick. In "Nature's Engraver" Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who never courted fame yet revolutionised wood-engraving and influenced book illustration for a century to come. It is a story of violent change and radical politics, of Newcastle and the Tyne, workshops and family life, mines and fells, the sea and the fierce west winds - a journey into a past whose energy and power still haunt us today, and the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.
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Title: Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge
Author: Linda Woodhead
Publisher: Profile
Price: £17.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Harry Gordon Selfridge
Category: Biography |
Welcome to the fabulous world of Harry Gordon Selfridge (1856-1947): father of modern retailing, philanderer, gambler, dandy and the greatest showman the consumer world has ever known. In Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge, the bustle of turn-of-the-century America is thrillingly evoked by fashion PR legend Lindy Woodhead as we’re introduced to the men who created the first department stores – what Zola called ‘great cathedrals of shopping’. The young Mr Selfridge learnt his trade in the nascent metropolis of Chicago – the Dubai of its day – where riches were lost as quickly as fortunes were made. Moving to London in 1907, Harry Selfridge lived through the tumult of the First World War and the glittering excesses of the 1920's when he lost millions at the gaming tables in France before being ousted from his store in 1939. His seductive talents extended much further than the shop floor too, as he racked up a lengthy list of female companions over the years. To this irrepressible man, ‘the store was a theatre with the curtain going up at 9 o’clock’: Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge tells the story of what happened before the curtain fell.
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Title: C.L.R. James
Author: Dave Renton
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Price: £12.00
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: C. L. R. James
Category: Biography |
Cyril Lionel Robert James was the great intellectual of the African revolution. He was a friend and inspiration to Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, the two leaders of the first generation of independence struggles. His account of Toussaint L'Ouverture's slave rebellion in Haiti is one of the great historical works of the twentieth century. His studies of Hegel and Marx became part of the common knowledge of several generations of radicals in America, Europe, the Caribbean and Africa. Although born in Trinidad, his thought was also shaped by the experience of migration to Britain. James was a product of the colonial education system, a world which shaped him, even as he exposed and fought it. In Britain today, James is known as both for his radicalism and also for his extraordinary autobiography "Beyond a Boundary", by common consent, the greatest book about cricket ever written.
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Title: Adam Smith
Author: James Buchan
Publisher: Profile
Price: £7.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Adam Smith
Category: Biography |
Adam Smith was long ago adopted as the father of a neo-conservative economic ideology, not least by Thatcher and Reagan. More recently, New Labour has tried to kidnap him as an ancestor. In a vigorous and informal book, James Buchan shows that Smith fits no modern political category. As befits the most accessible of all philosophers, this biography does entirely without jargon.
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Title: Black Tom
Author: Andrew Hopper
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Price: £16.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Thomas Fairfax
Category: Biography
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Sir Thomas Fairfax, not Oliver Cromwell, was creator and commander of Parliament's New Model Army from 1645 to 1650. Although Fairfax emerged as England's most successful commander of the 1640s, this book challenges the orthodoxy that he was purely a military figure, showing how he was not apolitical or disinterested in politics. The book combines narrative and thematic approaches to explore the wider issues of popular allegiance, puritan religion, concepts of honour, image, reputation, memory, gender, literature, and Fairfax's relationship with Cromwell. "Black Tom" delivers a groundbreaking examination of the transformative experience of the English revolution from the viewpoint of one of its leading, yet most neglected, participants. It is the first modern academic study of Fairfax, making it essential reading for university students as well as historians of the seventeenth century. Its accessible style will appeal to a wider audience of those interested in the civil wars and interregnum more generally.
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Title: Before Night Falls
Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Price: £8.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Reinaldo Arenas
Category: Biography |
This is the shocking memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, giving an account of his life as a writer and a homosexual and his struggle for freedom of expression. He describes his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, his suppression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, and his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift. He never really reconciled himself to life in America away from the beloved country of his birth, and committed suicide in 1990 at the age of 47, already dying from Aids.
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Title: The Man Who Stopped Time
Author: Brian Clegg
Publisher: Sutton
Price: £20.00
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Photographers
Category: Biography |
This book tells the vivid story of the pioneer of photography, Eadweard Muybridge. His extraordinary personal story has all the ingredients of drama. He was born in the English suburbs, and set out to seek adventure and fortune in the American Wild West. While visiting Europe his coach overturned, and he was treated for a fractured skull. It was at this time that photography grew. Muybridge became a pioneering innovator, who not only invented new methods of photography, but devised 'a flying studio' which enabled him to dvelop his pictures in the field. He was betrayed by his wife, and risked everything by killing her lover. Muybridge's work is iconic, the picture of the moving horse, which proved how it lifted its four feet off the ground simultaneously, known throughout the world. His distinctive stop-motion pictures of men, women, boxers, wrestlers, racehorses, elephants and camels frozen in time, captured in the act of moving, fighting, galloping, living, have become some of the most famous images in the history of photography and science. |
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Title: Adam Smith: Radical and Egalitarian
Author: Iain McLean
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Price: £15.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Adam Smith
Category: Biography |
This book aims to show that Adam Smith (1723-90), the author of "The Wealth of Nations", was not the promoter of ruthless laissez-faire capitalism that is still frequently depicted. Smith's "right-wing" reputation was sealed after his death when it was not safe to claim that an author may have influenced the French revolutionaries. But, as the author, also, of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", which he probably regarded as his more important book, Smith sought a non-religious grounding for morals, and found it in the principle of sympathy, which should lead an impartial spectator to understand others' problems. |
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Title: Suffer and Survive
Author: Martin Goodman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Price: £14.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: John Haldane
Category: Biography |
John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) was one of the greatest and most colourful of British scientists, acknowledged as the leading physiologist of the era at a time when physiology and much of medical science was coming into its own. The most successful serial self-experimenter in the history of science, Haldane crawled through the carnage of underground explosions, locked himself in sealed chambers, breathed in lethal cocktails of gases, sampled his own blood, burned and healed his own flesh, and experimented on his own children, in an obsessional push to understand the nature of human respiration. What is expired air? How can you make coalmines safer? What does carbon monoxide do to people? These are just some of the vital questions to which Haldane provided the answers, saving thousands of lives in the process. He also designed the first space-suit and invented the gas-mask, among many other innovations and contributions we still benefit from today. Entertaining and enlightening in equal measure, Martin Goodman's lively and revealing biography casts new light on one of the greatest eccentrics of British scientific and intellectual life. |
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Title: Ian Botham: My Illustrated Life
Author: Ian Botham
Publisher: Cassell Illustrated
Price: £18.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Ian Botham
Category: Biography |
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the debut of one of the world's greatest cricketers, this will be an official book, with authoritative text from Mark Baldwin ("The Times"), supported with lavish full colour and b/w photos of Ian Botham's life and cricket career. Following his Test debut in 1977, Ian will be choosing the best photographs that highlight his finest moments in the game, and working alongside Mark Baldwin, he will caption each of them as well as provide an extended introduction on the countries he has played against, players he's faced, and characters he's met along the way. His friend and rock legend, Sir Mick Jagger, will provide the foreword. This will be the only book anyone will need to track the meteor-like career of one of the game's greatest players, as well as see what he gets up to behind the scenes, including his legendary charity walks for John O'Groats to Lands End. |
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Title: Thomas Paine
Author: Craig Nelson
Publisher: Profile
Price: £20.00
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Tom Paine
Category: Biography
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Craig Nelson's rich and vivid biography does justice to one of of the world's greatest thinkers, bringing him to life against the dramatic backdrop of the Revolutionary era and the Age of Enlightenment that he helped to shape. Nelson traces Paine's dramatic path from his years as a struggling London mechanic to his journey after fortune in the New World; from his early pamphleteering to his heroism as the voice of revolution on two continents; and from his miraculous escape from execution in Paris to his final years in America.
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Title: Elizabeth Fry
Author: June Rose
Publisher: Tempus
Price: £12.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Elizabeth Fry
Category: Biography |
Elizabeth Fry, mother of eleven children and a Quaker minister, is today seen as one of the most influential and enigmatic women in English history. Dismayed by the terrible prison conditions in the early nineteenth century, Fry drew the world's attention to the plight of incarcerated women, and became a living legend. A symbol of saintliness and virtue, 'Betsy' Fry was described in parliament as 'the genius of good'. Yet, during her lifetime this remarkable woman aroused hostility as well as admiration. Quakers found her 'worldliness' disquieting; not all of her fellow penal reformers approved of her unorthodox ways and her family felt neglected. As for Betsy herself, she was tortured throughout her life by self-doubt and anxiety and torn between the demands of her family, her religion and her own attraction to the 'high life'. June Rose's classic biography, based on Elizabeth Fry's private journals, reveals the 'saint' as she really was. She removes Fry from her pedestal and reawakens our interest in this complex, contradictory personality who defied the conventions of her age to fulfil her destiny. |
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Title: Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life
Author: Angela V. John
Publisher: Tempus
Price: £12.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Elizabeth Robins
Category: Biography
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Beautiful and talented, versatile and charismatic, Elizabeth Robins was one of the foremost actresses of her day. Yet, this enduring character was also an active and lifelong feminist, and her life as a suffragette saw her working alongside the Pankhursts in the Women's and Social and Political Union. A prolific novelist and playwright, her play "Votes for Women!" changed the nature of theatre by instigating suffrage drama. She became so well known for portraying characters from Ibsen's plays that she is credited with bringing the playwright's work to prominence. Born in America during the Civil War, Elizabeth nevertheless made her home in England, where she became acquainted with Oscar Wilde, Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Henry James. Oscar Wilde introduced her to the London stage, and before long she had become one of the most popular actresses in London with an assured entry into London's leading artistic and political circles. Encountering heartbreak and solitude (Elizabeth's husband George Park drowned himself in 1887), this remarkable actress became one of the most fascinating characters of the fin de siecle world. In this intriguing biography, Angela John examines Elizabeth's historical identity and, drawing extensively on her diaries, letters and reviews, provides a fascinating study of the social culture surrounding a woman who lived a life in the spotlight.
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Title: Thomas Hodgkin
Author: Michael Wolfers
Publisher: Merlin Press
Price: £16.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Thomas Hodgkin
Category: Biography |
Thomas Hodgkin (1910-1982) was an intriguing figure: public schoolboy, Oxford student, colonial official, Marxist, dissident and Oxford don. He left the colonial office after becoming convinced that Britain was not respecting the Palestinians. He travelled extensively in Africa and became one of the founders of the new discipline of African Studies, writing African Political Parties and Nationalism in Colonial Africa. His Vietnam: The Revolutionary Path was written in the midst of the American intervention. An unconventional scholar, he met many prominent political figures - Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara and Kwame Nkrumah among them. Wolfers records the successes and strengths as well as failures and weaknesses, candidly telling the story of Hodgkin's unusual 'marriage of three'. Drawing on an immense store of unpublished material in the Hodgkin family papers, Michael Wolfers provides the first detailed biography of Thomas Hodgkin - a remarkable human being and intellectual.
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Educational Websites
Standards Site, BBC History, PBS Online, Open Directory Project, Virtual Library,
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History on the Net, Black History, Greenfield History, School History, HistoryWorld, I Love History,
E-HELP, Ed Podesta Blog, Macgregorish History, Historiasiglo20, Sintermeerten, ICT4LT |
News and Search
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