Italy, Summer 1944

A unit of German soldiers arrives at a villa near Florence. Villa Il Focardo is home to Robert Einstein, cousin to the most famous scientist in the world, Albert Einstein – a prominent enemy of the Nazi regime. Having renounced his German citizenship a decade earlier, Albert’s safely in America, well beyond Hitler’s reach.

The same is not true for his cousin.

Twelve hours after arriving, the soldiers have vanished – and a family is dead. This crime – and what happened next – still haunts those who survived.

Who ordered it? Who was involved?

And why did they get away with it?

This is the untold story of the Einstein vendetta.

Edward Jenner is perhaps the world's most famous doctor. He developed a vaccination for smallpox beginning in 1796, long before the world knew about bacteria and viruses. He has been described as `the man who saved more lives than anyone else'. He bought The Chantry at Berkeley in 1785 and modified it to make a home fit for his beloved wife, Catherine. This book is the result of a three-year investigation that set out to discover the house that Jenner prepared for Catherine. It traces the origin of the house, which was built in 1707, and the many changes throughout the next 300 years. It turns out that the site has a history going back to Anglo-Saxon times. Edward Jenner lived there for only thirty-six years, but the house has been much changed since. The investigation set out to define the house that Edward Jenner lived in, separating it from the original and many changes afterwards. The book includes a great deal of information and stories about the people involved, including Edward Jenner and his family and estate. It also includes the inventory of Jenner's goods in 1823 and profiles of the internal plasterwork, which may be of interest to restorers and historians.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize""
"The New York Times Book Review," Editor's Choice
American Heritage, Best of 2009
In this vivid new biography of Abigail Adams, the most illustrious woman of the founding era, Bancroft Award-winning historian Woody Holton offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Adams's life story and of women's roles in the creation of the republic.
Using previously overlooked documents from numerous archives, Abigail Adams shows that the wife of the second president of the United States was far more charismatic and influential than historians have realized. One of the finest writers of her age, Adams passionately campaigned for women's education, denounced sex discrimination, and matched wits not only with her brilliant husband, John, but with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. When male Patriots ignored her famous appeal to "Remember the Ladies," she accomplished her own personal declaration of independence: Defying centuries of legislation that assigned married women's property to their husbands, she amassed a fortune in her own name.
Adams's life story encapsulates the history of the founding era, for she defined herself in relation to the people she loved or hated (she was never neutral), a cast of characters that included her mother and sisters; Benjamin Franklin and James Lovell, her husband's bawdy congressional colleagues; Phoebe Abdee, her father's former slave; her financially naive husband; and her son John Quincy.
At once epic and intimate, Abigail Adams, sheds light on a complicated, fascinating woman, one of the most beloved figures of American history.

At last we can know who 'king' Arthur was, when he lived and what he did. This is the first work on the legendary hero started without any axe to grind. Here it is demonstrated that Arthur was a Coeling - a prince directly descended from Old King Cole - selected as a very young age by the kings of the 'Hen Ogled' (The Old north, which had been a magor subdivision of Roman Britannia) to be 'Pendragon' (Army Commander in Chief) of the alliance of forces tasked to put an end to raids into their lands by Picts and Scots once and for all. The sites of the 12 famous battles are identified, Arthur's pedigree is specified and the circumstances of his death examined. Such well know elements of Arthurian legend as 'Excalibur', Camelot, Karduel and the 'Isle of Avalon' are all identified, explained and put in context. This book then goes on to suggest where the boundary between history and legend lies, identifying the relationship between the two and showing how the legend developed in the first place. Finally Arthur's legacy is assessed.

Veering from the hilarious to the tragic, Andrew Mitchell's tales from the parliamentary jungle make for one of the most entertaining political memoirs in years. From his prep school years, straight out of Evelyn Waugh, through the Army to Cambridge, the City of London and the Palace of Westminster, Mitchell has passed through a series of British institutions at a time of furious social and political change - in the process becoming rather more cynical about the British Establishment. Here, he reflects on the perils and pleasures of loyalty, whether to a party, to individuals or to one's own principles. He brilliantly lifts the lid on the dark arts of the government Whips' Office ('Whipping, like stripping, is best done in private') and reveals how he accidentally started Boris Johnson's political career and later naively backed him to be Prime Minister - an act which rebounded on him spectacularly. Mitchell also writes candidly about the Plebgate fiasco, which led to four police officers being sacked for gross misconduct and in one case imprisoned, while Mitchell himself faced a bill of millions of pounds in legal fees after losing his libel case. Engagingly honest about his ups and downs in politics, Beyond a Fringe is crammed with hilarious political anecdotes and irresistible insider gossip from the heart of Westminster.

A biography of the Polish friar, canonized in 1982, who founded the Militia of the Immaculate, wrote numerous periodicals and newspapers, and while imprisoned in Auschwitz, sacrificed his life for another man.

From one of America's most respected journalists and modern historians comes the highly acclaimed, "splendid" (The Washington Post) biography of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian. Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure-ridiculed and later revered-with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people. Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first. "One of the best in a celebrated genre of presidential biography," (The Washington Post), His Very Best traces how Carter evolved from a timid, bookish child-raised mostly by a Black woman farmhand-into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties. This "important, fair-minded, highly readable contribution" (The New York Times Book Review) will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

Robert Southey was an English poet and contemporary of Nelson. It was his ambition to write a clear and concise life of Nelson which could be easily absorbed by any young sailor.'

At last we can know who 'king' Arthur was, when he lived and what he did. This is the first work on the legendary hero started without any axe to grind. Here it is demonstrated that Arthur was a Coeling - a prince directly descended from Old King Cole - selected as a very young age by the kings of the 'Hen Ogled' (The Old north, which had been a magor subdivision of Roman Britannia) to be 'Pendragon' (Army Commander in Chief) of the alliance of forces tasked to put an end to raids into their lands by Picts and Scots once and for all. The sites of the 12 famous battles are identified, Arthur's pedigree is specified and the circumstances of his death examined. Such well know elements of Arthurian legend as 'Excalibur', Camelot, Karduel and the 'Isle of Avalon' are all identified, explained and put in context. This book then goes on to suggest where the boundary between history and legend lies, identifying the relationship between the two and showing how the legend developed in the first place. Finally Arthur's legacy is assessed.

The true story of a Jewish lawyer who returned to Germany after WWII to prosecute war crimes, only to find himself pitted against a nation determined to bury the past.

At the end of the Nuremberg trial in 1946, some of the greatest war criminals in history were sentenced to death, but hundreds of thousands of Nazi murderers and collaborators remained at large. The Allies were ready to overlook their pasts as the Cold War began, and the horrors of the Holocaust were in danger of being forgotten.

In The Prosecutor, Jack Fairweather brings to life the remarkable story of Fritz Bauer, a gay German Jew who survived the Nazis and made it his mission to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide. In this deeply researched book, Fairweather draws on unpublished family papers, newly declassified German records, and exclusive interviews to immerse readers in the dark, unfamiliar world of postwar West Germany where those who implemented genocide run the country, the CIA is funding Hitler’s former spy-ring in the east, and Nazi-era anti-gay laws are strictly enforced. But once Bauer lands on the trail of Adolf Eichmann, he won’t be intimidated. His journey takes him deep into the rotten heart of West Germany, where his fight for justice will set him against his own government and a network of former Nazis and spies determined to silence him.

In a time when the history of the Holocaust is taken for granted, The Prosecutor reveals the courtroom battles that were fought to establish its legacy and the personal cost of speaking out. The result is a searing portrait of a nation emerging from the ruins of fascism and one man’s courage in forcing his people––and the world––to face the truth.