Historical Memoirs

In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of 73. Through the lens of personality - Stalin’s as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them - the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old.

In the romantic narrative of the Old West, two larger-than-life characters emerged as the perfect foils for each other - the rampant outlaw and the heroic peace officer. Without the villain, sheriffs would not have needed to uphold the law; and without the sheriff, villains would have had no law to break. Together, both personalities fought, lost, and triumphed amid shootouts, train robberies, and bank holdups against the backdrop of the lawless American frontier.

Depuis 1936, après la remilitarisation de la Rhénanie, Hitler jouit du soutien de la grande majorité des Allemands. L'Allemagne prospère grâce à la reprise économique et accumule les succès diplomatiques, cependant que l'autorité charismatique d'Hitler soumet les milieux d'affaires et l'armée, qui souscrivent à sa volonté de domination du continent européen.

Hailed by critics as an American masterpiece, David McCullough's sweeping biography of Harry S. Truman captured the heart of the nation. The life and times of the 33rd president of the United States, Truman provides a deeply moving look at an extraordinary, singular American.

This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber, whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.

They are the most chronicled family on the face of the globe. Their every move attracts headlines. Scores of books have tried and failed to penetrate the royal facade. Now Kitty Kelley has gone behind palace walls to provide the first three-dimensional, comprehensive, and evenhanded portrait of the men and women who make up the British Royal family.

This life-sized portrait of Stuart surveys his life from childhood through his training at West Point, his years on the Western frontier, and his decision to stand with Virginia when war arrived. His brilliant Civil War career is covered in detail, from the raid on Chambersburg to his final, fatal clash at Yellow Tavern.

General Stonewall Jackson was like no one anyone had ever seen. In April of 1862 he was merely another Confederate general with only a single battle credential in an army fighting in what seemed to be a losing cause. By middle June he had engineered perhaps the greatest military campaign in American history and was one of the most famous men in the Western World. He had given the Confederate cause what it had recently lacked: hope.

Plongez dans des histoires criminelles captivantes qui mettent en lumière certains des tueurs en série les plus sinistres et notoires de notre histoire collective. De HH Holmes, l'homme aux 200 meurtres, à Landru, le tueur en série français, en passant par le monstre de Montmartre Thierry Paulin et le mystérieux Monstre de Florence, chaque récit vous entraînera dans un univers sombre et terrifiant. Explorez les motivations complexes, les méthodes macabres et les enquêtes palpitantes liées à ces crimes épouvantables.

Acclaimed author Andrea di Robilant sweeps listeners back to 18th-century Venice for a spellbinding tale of forbidden love. Originally serialized in The New Yorker, this dazzling story is based on actual family letters. The letters describe a searing and illicit affair between the author’s ancestor, a great Venetian statesman, and a beautiful half-English girl. The couple pursued their passion with reckless abandon, offending nearly everyone, and even getting some help along the way from the infamous Casanova.

He was the most wanted man in the world for decades. Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born terrorist, carried out a wave of attacks across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. A ruthless self-proclaimed revolutionary and notorious womanizer, he claimed to fight for the Palestinian cause and communist ideology, but also worked as a mercenary for rogue regimes and organizations. After bursting onto the world stage with the 1975 OPEC siege in Vienna, where he took 60 hostages and killed three people, he managed to evade capture for two decades.

A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire.

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.

When John Stoessinger was ten years old, Adolf Hitler annexed his homeland of Austria, ripping the boy from his home and his friends in Vienna. His grandparents encouraged his mother and stepfather to take young John somewhere safe. "You must have a future," his grandfather told him before he and his parents boarded the train and waved goodbye. As they trekked across the country, from Vienna to Prague and then finally settling in Shanghai, there was never a single moment Stoessinger was not afraid.

Le commandant SS Heinz Linge (1913-1980) fut, pendant dix ans, le majordome d’Adolf Hitler. Cet ancien maçon intègre les rangs militaires dès 1933 pour devenir dans un premier temps garde du corps. Il intègre peu à peu le cercle restreint de son maître, dont il est l’un des plus fidèles partisans.

Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse—offering her too many options of all the wrong kind. Her innate sensitivity left her vulnerable to the harsh realities of the street, where she was left to fend for herself before she reached double digits. Her record of petty crimes spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. But in 1953, a catastrophic twist of fate would catapult her out of obscurity and into the headlines.

A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.

From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat.

In six weeks in 1940, France was overrun by German troops and surrendered. One junior French general, refusing to accept defeat, made his way to England. On 18 June he spoke to his compatriots over the BBC, urging them to rally to him in London. At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered into history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle frequently bit the hand that fed him. He insisted on being treated as the true embodiment of France, and quarrelled violently with Churchill and Roosevelt. But he managed to have France recognised as one of the victorious Allies.

This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi's arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, author Ramachandra Guha has drawn on 60 different archival collections. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions, and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.