This is a discussion of the transformation of drug use (especially morphine and cocaine, which was once commonly available in any chemist's shop) into a national menace. It revolves around the death of Billie Carleton, a West End musical actress, in 1918. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. They were eventually identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menac...

A journey through Europe’s old towns, exploring why we treasure them—but also what they hide about a continent’s fraught history“[A] fascinating chronicle.”—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street JournalHistoric quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attra...

Marek Kohn - 'one of the best science writers we have' (AC Grayling) - paints an important and eye-opening portrait of Britain and Ireland after a century of global warming.Author of A Reason for Everything and Four Words for Friend Marek Kohn projects one hundred years into the future when, based on the climate change evidence we have now, some parts of Britain will be like regions of today's Mediterranean. But...

A fascinating journey through Europe's old towns, exploring why we treasure them—but also what they hide about a continent's fraught historyHistoric quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations a...

**How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more?This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The *New York Times)—*of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs a...

A look at Adolf Hitler's residences and their role in constructing and promoting the dictator's private persona both within Germany and abroad.Adolf Hitler's makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator's preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler'...

The sensational story of a cache of masterpieces not seen since they vanished during the Nazi terror—a bizarre tale of a father and aged son, of secret deals, treachery and the search for truth.The world was stunned when eighty-year old Cornelius Gurlitt became an international media superstar in November 2013 on the discovery of over 1,400 artworks in his 1,076 square-foot Munich apartment, valued at around $1.35 billion. Gurlitt became known as a man who never wa...

A radical and exciting history of a city – its culture, its people and its politics – that refreshes our image of Europe’s past and of the writing of history itself.In Berlin, history is tangible. The sense of the past – of Europe, of Germany, and in particular of the twentieth century with its myths, depravities, idealism and horror – hangs in the air around the old Hinterhofs and deserted railway stations. No other city has played such a part in the tides of twentieth-century Eur...

**"A most valuable book." —Christian Science MonitorFor readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners.**While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Throu...

Moscow, 1937: the soviet metropolis at the zenith of Stalin’s dictatorship. A society utterly wrecked by a hurricane of violence.In this compelling book, the renowned historian Karl Schlögel reconstructs with meticulous care the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the ‘Great Terror’ during which 1 ½ million human beings lost their lives within a single year. He revisits the sites of show trials and executions and, by als...

Until the end of World War II, East Prussia was the German empire's farthest eastern redoubt, a thriving and beautiful land on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Now it lives only in history and in myth. Since 1945, the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, stretching from the border between Russia and Lithuania in the east and south, and through Poland in the west. In Forgotten Land, Max Egremont offers a vivid account of this region and its peopl...

On 7 May 1945, Grand Admiral Donitz, named in Hitler's will as head of state, authorised the unconditional surrender of all German forces to the Allies on the following day. World War II in Europe was at an end. But many of the German people would continue to endure hardships, as both the country and the capital were to be divided between France, the UK and the USA in the west and the USSR in the east. East and West Germany, and East and West Berlin, would remain divided u...