A look at the royal women of twelfth-century England—from the empowered to the imprisoned—and their roles in the ruling dynasty.Eleanor of Aquitaine and her second husband, Henry II, are commonly considered medieval figures, but their era was really the violent transition from the Dark Ages, when countries' borders were defined with fire and sword. Henry grabbed the English throne thanks largely to Eleanor's dowry, because she owned one third of France. But their le...

After the guns fell silent in May 1945, the USSR resumed its clandestine warfare against the western democracies. Stalin installed secret police services in the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Trained by his NKVD officers of the Polish UB, the Czech StB, the Hungarian AVO, Romania's Securitate, Bulgaria's KDS, Albania's Sigurimi and the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic spied on and ruthlessly repressed their fellow citizens on the Soviet model. Wh...

When Count Henry of Anjou and his formidable wife Eleanor of Aquitaine became king and queen of England, they amassed an empire stretching 1,000 miles from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border, including half of France. Henry’s grandmother Empress Mathilda of Germany had taught him that ruling is like falconry: show the hawk the reward, but take it away at the last moment, to keep the bird eager to please. To sons and vassals alike, Henry promised everything but gave nothing, keeping the th...

The toll that both Nazi occupation and Allied liberation took on this northern French region during World War II, told through eyewitness accounts.Famous for Calvados apple brandy and Camembert cheese, Normandy is a green and pleasant land now dotted with thousands of British-owned second homes. Its coastline is also dotted with thousands of indestructible reinforced-concrete bunkers and gun emplacements that formed part of the Atlantic Wall of Hitler's Fortress Eu...

An overview of deadly diseases from throughout world history spanning from prehistoric civilizations to the twenty-first century.All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travelers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civilizations died fast, leaving cities undamaged to mystify archeologists. Plague in Athens killed 30% of the population 430–426 BCE. When Roman Emperor Justinian I caught bubonic plague in 541 CE, co...

Of the 2.3 million National Servicemen conscripted during the Cold War, 4,200 attended the secret Joint Services School for Linguists, tasked with supplying much-needed Russian speakers to the three services. After training, they were sent to the front lines in Germany and elsewhere to snoop on Soviet aircraft in real time.Posted to RAF Gatow in Berlin, ideally placed for signals interception, author Douglas Boyd came to know Hitler's devastated former capital. Pul...

Eleanor of Aquitaine was the only person ever to sit on the thrones of both France and England. In this account of the turbulent adventures of the extraordinary mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John, author Douglas Boyd takes us into the heart and mind of the woman who changed the shape of Europe for 300 years by marrying Henry of Anjou to make him England's Henry II. Brought up in the comfort- and culture-loving Mediterranean civilisation of southern France, she w...

Lore Schindler was ten years old when her dentist father Harry was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His wife Grete bought his release by giving all their possessions to the Nazi state. Leaving Germany with just 10 Marks each, parents and daughter suffered humiliating strip searches at the border. This was the start of Lore's ordeal. In her first French concentration camp, her mother died. Her father also died in another camp. Orphaned and ill ...

Forget the adventure stories of James Bond, Kim Philby, Klaus Fuchs and co. – espionage is not just a boys' game. As long as there has been conflict, there have been female agents behind the scenes. In Belgium and northern France in 1914–18 there were several thousand women actively working against the Kaiser's forces occupying their homelands. In the Second World War, women of many nations opposed the Nazis, risking the firing squad or decapitation by axe or guillotine. Y...

When people think of Richard the Lionheart they recall the scene at the end of every Robin Hood epic when he returns from the Crusades to punish his treacherous brother John and the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. In reality Richard detested England and the English, was deeply troubled by his own sexuality and was noted for greed, not generosity, and for murder rather than mercy. In youth Richard showed no interest in girls; instead, a taste for cruelty and a rapacity for go...

The key to getting on with our closest Continental neighbours is to know the truth about what they endured during the German Occupation in the Second World War. Forget the films and television dramas about the Resistance; here is the true picture of the Occupation. This often chilling history, based on previously unpublished accounts by men and women who lived through it, tells how they went cold and hungry while Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier made their fortunes. Whole ...

Winston Churchill called it 'the unknown war'. Unlike the long stalemate of the Western Front, the conflict 1914–18 between the Russian Empire and the Central Powers was a war of movement spanning a continent – from the Arctic to the Adriatic, Black and Caspian seas and from the Baltic in the west to the Pacific Ocean.The appalling scale of casualties provoked strikes in Russia's war industries and widespread mutinies at the front. As the whole fabric of society co...