Susan Ronald, acclaimed author of Hitler's Art Thief takes readers into the shadowy world of the aristocrats and business leaders on both sides of the Atlantic who secretly aided Hitler and Nazi Germany. Hitler said, “I am convinced that propaganda is an essential means to achieve one’s aims.” Enlisting Europe’s aristocracy, international industrialists, and the political elite in Britain and America, Hitler spun a treacherous tale everyone wanted to believe: he was a man of peace. Central to his deception was an international high society Black Widow, Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, whom Hitler called “his dear princess.” She, and others, conspired for Hitler at the highest levels of the British aristocracy and spread their web to America's wealthy powerbrokers. Hitler’s aristocrats became his eyes, listening posts, and mouthpieces in the drawing rooms, cocktail parties, and weekend retreats of Europe and America. Among these “gentlemen spies” and “ladies of mystery” were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lady Nancy Astor, Charles Lindbergh, and two of the Mitford sisters. They were the trusted voices disseminating his political and cultural propaganda about the “New Germany,” brushing aside the Nazis’ atrocities. Distrustful of his own Foreign Ministry, Hitler used his aristocrats to open the right doors in Great Britain and the United States, creating a formidable fifth column within government and financial circles. In a tale of drama and intrigue, Hitler’s Aristocrats uncovers the battle between these influencers and those who heroically opposed them.

Publisher description

'The best one-volume study of Churchill yet available.' David Cannadine, Observer 'Magisterial.' Vernon Bogdanor, New Statesman 'A tour de force... A masterly chronicle of Churchill as a domestic figure rather than as the bulldog wartime leader, and one of the most subtle portraits of him as a politician. Addison revises the view of Churchill as uninterested and out of his depth in domestic affairs, painting instead a nuanced picture of a canny parliamentarian. Churchill changed parties twice but managed to accomplish the change, writes Addison, 'with exceptional dexterity', making it appear as if he were maintaining his principles while the parties changed theirs... Addison's most interesting assertion is that the rise of Hitler saved Churchill from drifting into right-wing irrelevance. Most impressively, Addison doesn't settle for easy classifications, admitting that 'Churchill... is a man of whom almost everything that can be said is true in part.'' Kirkus Review

Its sixteen thematic chapters - each written by an expert in the field - cover social and economic developments, the rise and fall of all the major political movements as well as the immense changes generated by war and international diplomacy across Europe.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was the twentieth century's most influential economist. His ideas inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch the New Deal and instructed Western nations on how to ward off revolutionary unrest, economic instability, high unemployment, and social dissolution. Keynes was nothing less than the Adam Smith of his time: his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Moneybecame as important in the twentieth century as Smith's The Wealth of Nations was in the eighteenth. Now, in the long wake of the 2008 global economic collapse, Keynesian economics is once again shaping our world. In Universal Man, acclaimed historian Richard Davenport-Hines offers the first biography of Keynes that reveals the man in full. Like many Englishmen of his class and era, Keynes compartmentalized his life. Accordingly, Davenport-Hines treats Keynes in turn as a youthful prodigy, a powerful government official, an influential public man, a bisexual living in the shadow of Oscar Wilde's persecution, a devotee of the arts, and an international statesman of worldwide renown. Delving into Keynes's experiences and thought, Davenport-Hines shows us a man who was equally at ease socializing with the Bloomsbury Group as he was persuading heads of state to adopt his policies. Through Davenport-Hines' nuanced portrait, we come to understand not just the most enduringly influential economist of the modern era, but one of the most gifted and vital men of our times: a disciplined logician with a capacity for glee who persuaded people, seduced them, subverted old ideas, and installed new ones. Engaging, learned, and sparkling with wit and insight, Universal Man is the perfect match for its brilliant subject.

The first study to compare Churchill and Chamberlain systematically in relation to appeasement and defence policy in the 1930s.