Alexander Fleming, the man and the myth

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Larry Loftis

A biography of Dusko Popov, who, as "an operative for the Abwehr, SD, MI5, MI6, and FBI during World War II ... seduced countless women--including agents on both sides--spoke five languages, and was a crack shot, all while maintaining his cover as a Yugoslav diplomat"--Amazon.com. August 1941. Serbian playboy Dusko Popov created a stir at Casino Estoril in Portugal by throwing down an outrageously large baccarat bet to humiliate his opponent. The Serbian was a British double agent, and the money-- which he had just stolen from the Germans-- belonged to the British. Watching at the sideline was none other than Ian Fleming. An operative for the Abwehr, SD, MI5, MI6, and FBI during World War II, Popov seduced countless women, spoke five languages, and was a crack shot. While MI5 desperately needed Popov to deceive the Abwehr about the D-Day invasion, they assured him that a return to the German Secret Service Headquarters in Lisbon would result in torture and execution. He went anyway....

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Michael Ignatieff

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Riga timber merchant and the first Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, he was a presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic for sixty years: historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time. But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, in Israel as the new state came into being. For this definitive biography - the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject - Michael Ignatieff, himself a leading public intellectual, interviewed Berlin extensively and was granted complete access to his papers, one of the largest archives in Anglo-American cultural history. Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique liberal temperament - serene, comic, secular, and unafraid - and he examines its influence on Berlin's vision of liberalism, which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral choice.

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John Robson

This book is a biography of David James, written by a close friend, who was christened David Pelham James, later changed his name to David Guthrie-James, but was always known simply as David. The list of contents indicates what a full and varied life he led. David's mother was from the Guthrie family, and from her he inherited Torosay Castle on the Island of Mull, which remained a passion throughout his life. His son Christopher reluctantly sold the property in 2012.

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Giles Whittell

The story of the unsung heroines who flew the newest, fastest, aeroplanes in World War II - mostly in southern England where the RAF was desperately short of pilots.