Gabrielle Petit

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Sebastian Faulks

A worthy successor to Birdsong' Alain de BottonIn 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special oeprations group and to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in 'the black years'. Here is the full range of collaboration, from the tacit to the enthusistic, as well as examples of extraordinary courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte meets his father, a Jewish painter whose inspiration has failed him.In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks brings the story to a resolution of redemptive love. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a worthy successor to Birdsong.

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selected and edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock

Diary of the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister who lead Great Britain during the first two years of World War I. Covers the early war years and Lloyd George's defeat of Asquith's government in December 1916.

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Don Farr

"Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, the four subjects of this book are, for their social class and generation, not untypical examples of the consequences of the world turned upside down. In the summer of 1914 they were all on the threshold of Oxbridge careers, and looking forward, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, to working lives in one of the professions with the youthful hope that they might break the mould and end up doing something out of the ordinary. Instead, caught up in the patriotic fervours of war fever, all thoughts of university were put to one side by three of them as they applied themselves to getting army commisions so as not to miss out on a war popularly expected to be over by Christmas ... Two of them reached the Front in 1915 ... and the other two in 1916. As junior infantry officers in the conditions of trench warfare, as it had evolved in the early months of the war, their chances of survival were not high"--Introduction.

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the Countess of Carnarvon

Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration for the hit PBS show Downton Abbey, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the 5th Countess of Carnarvon and the basis of the fictional character Lady Cora Crawley. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war. Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de Rothschild, who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon's ancestral home. Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman. This rich tale contrasts the splendor of Edwardian life in a great house against the backdrop of the First World War and offers an inspiring and revealing picture of the woman at the center of the history of Highclere Castle. - Publisher.