Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Premier Grand Mayaniste de France: 2015
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Two hundred years ago, on September 8, 1814, in the northern French city of Bourbourg, a boy was...
Suite Francaise
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By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite...
Unusual in that I don't think I've ever come across history told in such a manner before.
And, I have to say: I think it worked.
This tells the life story of Manfred von Richtohofen, otherwise (and perhaps more famously) known as The Red Baron - a German ace during the infancy of flight, and of warfare in the air (during The Great War, or World War One as it would later become known).
While it does, perhaps, gloss over the more horrific aspects of the war in the air (no parachutes,with the planes being death-traps, and with Richtohofens policy of aiming for the pilot rather than the plane) I have to say that I did learn more from this than I was already aware of - and no, unlike some of my American counterparts, my knowledge of him did NOT come from the Peanuts (right? isn't that the one with Snoopy?) cartoon!
The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story
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Kamila is nine years old when she is taken from the poverty of her childhood village in southern...
Plato: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself
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Written by Dr Roy Jackson, who Senior Lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire, Plato: A...
Six Months to Live? ... I Don't Think So!: Judi's Journals
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In July 2006 Judi Seall was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given six months to live. Did she...
The Air Raid and the Easter Egg: Two Stories of a Scottish Childhood, 1940
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On the way to school one morning in 1940, six-year-old Maisie hears the air raid siren for the first...
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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Claude Levi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author of the classic Tristes...
Florence Nightingale: A Very Brief History
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Part One: The History (What do we know?) This brief historical introduction to Florence Nightingale...
John Christie of Rillington Place: Biography of a Serial Killer
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Sixty years ago, the discovery of bodies at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London, led to one...