Having sailed the East Coast for over sixty years, from Ocracoke to Gaspe, I know that thereâs nothing better than a few days of bad weather - if you`re safely at anchor in a well-protected cove. The wind in the rigging, rain drumming on the deck, the stove fired up, a mug of tea (with or without a tot of rum): add a good book, and that is pure happiness. After a hard day's sail - or just drifting along, becalmed - a good book is a sailor`s best friend.
In these two volumes, Massie shows how the naval arms race Kaiser Wilhelm undertook with his grandmother Queen Victoria led inexorably to the Great War and a century of conflict. The rise of a young power, contesting control of the seas with the established global empire: sound familiar? The stakes could not have been higher - as Churchill said of Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the British fleet: "He is the only man who could lose this war in a single afternoon." Jellicoe prevailed when that fateful afternoon came at Jutland, but Massie shows us the long drift to war that started decades before on a different afternoon: a yacht race at Cowes.
With the biographer's rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittering figures: the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz; the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow; Britain's greatest twentieth-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionized the British Navy and brought forth for the first true battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstanding, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, DreadnoughtâŚ
Iâve always loved horses, in real life and fiction. I guzzled up pony stories as soon as I was old enough to read, then I started writing them, tales of teenage orphans adopted by distant aunts who lived in crumbling stately piles with fields full of ponies. When I started writing fiction for a living, it stood to reason horses would feature, and three decades after one trotted into my debut novel French Relations â then galloped off into the sunset in its sequelWell Groomed- theyâre still a mainstay. Of the twenty novels Iâve written, more than half have horses at their heart, including my new Comptons series.Â
The glorious Flambards series, starring gutsy heroine Christina, was a staple for pony-mad teenagers in the 70s and 80s and is still held in great affection by its legions of fans. Itâs so full of heart and life that itâs stayed relevant and readable today. Orphaned at the turn of the twentieth century, Christina Parsons is sent to live with tyrannical, hunting-mad Uncle William and his two sons in their impoverished estate. One son, dashing thruster Mark, is thought to be a good match for Christina, but itâs his younger brother, the clever, awkward would-be aviator William who she falls for. Perhaps the most trusting and enduring love she finds, however, is that for horses, starting with the wonderful, kind Sweet Briar in this opening novel. The freedom they discover together, blasting across Flambardsâ ancient turf from Uncle Williamâs angry bellowing, is a tour de force.
When Christina is sent to live in the grand country house, Flambards, she doesn't know what to expect. Once there, she meets two young men, Mark and Will, trying to cope with their bad-tempered father. She also discovers a passion for horse-riding and a love for life in the country. As time goes by Christina begins to embrace her new life and all the social engagements that it involves, but with both brothers vying for her attention Christina knows it's just a matter of time before she has to choose . . .
I grew up with a graveyard in my backyard: the historic Schenck-Covenhoven Graveyard in Penns Neck, New Jersey, just outside Princeton. This small square plot, filled with the 18th- and 19th-century graves of local families, served as the perfect playground for hide-and-seek and cops-and-robbers with my friends. Working as a tour guide and volunteer at Laurel Hill Cemetery for nearly thirty years, I fell in love with its rich history and its architectural and horticultural beauty. As I grow older, I have come to value cemeteries for their role as both a meeting place and a mediator between the living and the dead.
January 1901: Queen Victoria is dead and her subjects nervously await a new king and a new century. Two familiesâthe aristocratic Colemans and middle-class Waterhousesâmeet at their adjoining plots in Londonâs elegant Highgate Cemetery. Their five-year-old daughters form an immediate bond. The lives of the two families entwine over the next decade as they struggle with social change, betrayal, and grief. Surprisingly, Highgate offers a release from the confining decorum of their everyday lives. The two girls play among the graves with a gravediggerâs son, while adult members of their households indulge in forbidden liaisons there. Chevalierâs crisp prose creates rich character portraits and vivid historical scenes with only a few strokes. This slim novel resonated in my mind long after I finished it.Â
'Sex and death meet again in [a] marvellous evocation of Edwardian England' Daily Mail
The girl reminded me of my favourite chocolates, whipped hazelnut creams, and I knew just from looking at her that I wanted her for my best friend.
Queen Victoria is dead. In January 1901, the day after her passing, two very different families visit neighbouring graves in a London cemetery. The traditional Waterhouses revere the late Queen where the Colemans have a more modern outlook, but both families are appalled by the friendship that springs up between their respective daughters.
Iâve always loved history and historical stories, but like the majority of people, didnât really know very much about WWI. That changed in early 2017 when I read The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara W Tuchman. I immediately fell into a vortex of further reading, resulting in my writing The War in Our Hearts at the end of that year--because although there is a lot of great non-fiction out there about WWI, there arenât nearly as many novels that quite scratched the itch I had for fictionâŚso I wrote the book I wanted to read!
My absolute favourite WWI novel, this is the story of several English young people who come of age during the Great War. It gives glimpses into home front life as well as life at the front. As usual, McKayâs characters are vibrant, maddening, loveable, ridiculous--sometimes all at once. The prose is elegant, poetic, subtle, will smack you in the feels, and stay in your mind long after.
The Skylarks' War is a beautiful story following the loves and losses of a family growing up against the harsh backdrop of World War One, from the award-winning Hilary McKay.
Clarry and her older brother Peter live for their summers in Cornwall, staying with their grandparents and running free with their charismatic cousin, Rupert. But normal life resumes each September - boarding school for Peter and Rupert, and a boring life for Clarry at home with her absent father, as the shadow of a terrible war looms ever closer.
I began my professional life as an actress and have skittered around the edges of theatre ever since, in various capacities. While I havenât been on a stage for nearly forty years and I wouldnât venture onto one at the point of a gun, I have always found the life of the actor fascinating. Iâm old enough to have witnessed huge changes in the theatre over the decades, and it is intriguing to discover how much has changedâabsconding managers are pretty well a thing of the past these days, and todayâs actors donât drink as muchâyet how much the adaptability and single-minded passion of actors remain the same.
This great book gives a comprehensive and amusing overview of English society in the Edwardian period and the battle between what the author calls the Established Order and New Ideas, as reflected in the theatre and womenâs role in society in particular. There is a very funny description of the role of the Censor, an employee of the Lord Chamberlain called the Examiner of Plays, an ex-bank manager who made his own rules according to his own whim and was accountable to nobody. The book also covers topics such as the popularity of âtheosophyâ and the occult; and the prevailing hypocrisy of the Old Order as epitomised in the attitude of the monarch, King Edward VII, who tolerated âirregularâ behaviour so long as it was discreet, and condemned public immorality while indulging in affairs left right and centre.
The Edwardian Turn of Mind brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporaryâŚ
Narrative history isnât about dates, kings, and queens. Itâs about deeds, actions, experiences, decisions of people great and small. Itâs about putting the reader in the middle of a drama and watching events unfold around them as if they were there so they can understand, observe, and perhaps ask: what would I have done? The best history writing shouldnât just inform, but inspire you, make you feel: laugh, cry, feel angry, flinch at horrific sights, cheer the heroes, boo the villains, because history is made by ordinary people, good and bad, who possess many similar traits to the reader.
If you want one book to understand how the first month or so of World War 1 played out, there is only one place to turn. Tuchmanâs book is beautifully written, with a rich tapestry of characters and events, it covers the major events in Europe in August and early September 1914. It is largely seen through the eyes of âgreat menââthe military and political leaders of the dayâwhich makes it slightly dated by todayâs standards, but the skill and humanity of the reader and the sheer scope of the narrative will keep you in their thrall.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER â˘Â âA brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchillâs statement that the first month of World War I was âa drama never surpassed.âââNewsweek  Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each stepâŚ
This marks the second time Jesse Francis and I have collaborated to explore an aspect of Prince Edward Island history. Our first bookâNiân na Lânu: The Miâkmaq of Prince Edward Island (2013)âwon three prizes. We hope this new work, which presents aspects of the history of the Miâkmaq along with those of French, Acadian, and British colonists, will be welcomed. We think it important to bring togetherârather than separateâthe many strands of our shared past.
The two authors combine their historical and geographical talents in this book. It offers a wealth of information on a wide range of themes relating to the famous Holland survey of the nascent British colony of St. Johnâs Island (later renamed Prince Edward Island). That survey, carried out on orders from the British Crown in 1764-65, generated the first fully accurate map of Prince Edward Island, dividing it into counties, townships, royalties, and individual lots that are still in place today. While the Holland survey was an exceptional technical achievement, itâand the subsequent lottery that allocated many of the lots to absentee ownersâled to many long-term complications on PEI. The well-illustrated study explains much about how and why the Islandâs subsequent history followed the course it did.
Bertrand Russell wrote that: âMathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty â a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.â I agree. Math is, however, a human thing, all tangled up with the nature of human personality and the history of our civilizations. Well-written biographies of great mathematicians put that âstern perfectionâ in a proper human context.
This is a work of historical fiction by a master storyteller. I have been acquainted with Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) since being given The Water-Babies and Westward Ho! to read in childhood. Here he takes as his subject Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415), daughter of the mathematician and philosopher Theon. She was played by Rachel Weisz in the 2009 movie Agora.
Hypatiaâs own contributions to mathematics are unclear. âAll Hypatia's work is lost except for its titles and some references to it,â says her biographical entry in the MacTutor online history of math; but since she does have a MacTutor entry, I claim her as a mathematician.
Queen Victoria liked Hypatia so much she appointed Charles Kingsley personal tutor to her son, the future King Edward VII.
Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face is an 1853 novel by the English writer Charles Kingsley. It is a fictionalised account of the life of the philosopher Hypatia, and tells the story of a young monk called Philammon who travels to Alexandria, where he becomes mixed up in the political and religious battles of the day. Although intended as Christian apologia, the novel has a deliberate anti-Catholic tone, and it also reflects Kingsley's other prejudices about race and religion, many of which were typical to the 19th century. For many years the book was considered one of Kingsley'sâŚ
Iâve always been a Titanic nerd, and this book was amazing, dispelling myths about the sinking and giving fantastic historical context to many of the people who sailed on the ship.
Russell explores the lives of several passengers, such as Macyâs Isidor Straus and film star Dorothy Gibson, weaving their stories in with that of the ship itself and, most of all, the era. It read like a novel!
âGareth Russell has chosen a handful of passengers on the doomed liner and by training a spotlight on every detail of their lives, he has given us a meticulous, sensitive, and at times harsh picture of the early 20th century in Britain and America. A marvelous piece of work.â âJulian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey
A riveting account of the Titanic disaster and the unraveling of the gilded Edwardian society that had created it.
In April 1912, six notable people were among those privileged to experience the height of luxuryâfirst class passage on âthe ship of dreams,â the RMS Titanic:âŚ
I grew up believing there was a mystery or puzzle around every corner. That guy holding a paper bag by the garbage can? Definitely a Russian spy about to make a drop. The giant house at the top of the street? For sure, haunted (or at least hiding buried treasure). My love for clue games and solving puzzles stemmed from the books and movies I loved as a child. Now, as a childrenâs author, I get to continue conjuring up clue games and secret spies and puzzling old houses from an ordinary world, one that with the right imagination can turn heartache and heavy things into something close to magic.
This story differs from the others on my list, as it takes place in England in the early twentieth century. Setting and time period aside, the plucky main character Tabitha along with her pet rat and fellow detective (in her mind) steal the show and our hearts. We canât help but root for her despite all she comes up against and all who belittle her as she follows clues in her unique and endearing manner through a giant and possibly haunted estate. Nooks & Crannies does a fine job balancing humor and wit with more serious subjects such as murder and abuse, and is sure to appeal to fans of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets Clue when six children navigate a mansion full of secretsâand maybe moneyâin this âdelightful gemâ (School Library Journal, starred review) with heart.
Sweet, shy Tabitha Crum, the neglected only child of two parents straight out of a Roald Dahl book, doesnât have a friend in the worldâexcept for her pet mouse, Pemberley, whom she loves dearly. But on the day she receives one of six invitations to the country estate of wealthy Countess Camilla DeMoss, her life changes forever.
Upon the childrenâs arrival at the sprawling, possibly haunted mansion, it turns out the countessâŚ
