PATRICK MARNHAM

Despite his colourful claims Diego Rivera was not actually raised by a magical nurse who let him roam the forest After studying in Mexico he became a key figure in the heyday of Montparnasse This book follows him through the free love of Paris and into World War I

Un essai sur la Résistance qui se lit comme un roman despionnageEn juin 1943 la Gestapo assène un double coup à la Résistance française. Elle décapite le vaste réseau qui, sous le nom de PROSPER, sét

This engrossing biography of Diego Rivera, the brilliant Mexican artist and revolutionary, captures the explosively passionate nature that made Rivera one of the twentieth-century's most gifted and c

One of our very best writers on France. Antony BeevorAfter publishing an acclaimed biography of Jean Moulin, leader of the French Resistance, Patrick Marnham received an anonymous letter from a person who claimed to have worked for British Intelligence during the war. The ex-spy praised his book but insisted that he had missed the real treasure. The letter drew Marnham back to the early 1960s when he had been taught French by a mercurial woman a former Resistance leader, whose SOE network was broken on the same day that Moulin was captured and who endured eighteen months in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Could these two events have been connected? His anonymous correspondent offered a tantalising set of clues that seemed to implicate Churchill and British Intelligence in the catastrophe.Drawing on a deep knowledge of France and original research in British and French archives, War in the Shadows exposes the ruthless double-dealing of the Allied intelligence services and the Gestapo through one of the darkest periods of the Second World War. It is a story worthy of Le Carre, but with this difference it is not fiction.A melange of Le Grand Meaulnes and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is unforgettable. Ferdinand Mount, TLS, Books of the YearA masterly analysis, impeccably presented. Allan Mallinson, SpectatorFascinating Marnham has a vast and scholarly knowledge of this often treacherous world. Caroline Moorehead, Literary Review

Mary Wesley published her first novel at seventy and went on to write a further nine bestsellers, including the legendary The Camomile Lawn, in a style best described as arsenic without the old lace. Many of her stories were inspired by her experiences during the Blitz, and by her marriages: the first to an aristocrat, a brief and conventional affair, and the second to a penniless writer she adored.A remarkable book about a remarkable woman, Patrick Marnhams brilliantly researched and wonderfully impartial book disentangles truth from rumour, highlighting the links between Wesleys real life and her fiction.

The terrifying first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare in history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering in the age of mass destruction. Yet it was also the climax of a story that extends beyond Japan and Washington: the culmination of decades of scientific achievement and centuries of colonial exploitation. Snake Dance is the account of a journey that turned into a quest to discover how humanity reaches this point. Patrick Marnham travels from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the lethally derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa. He follows the shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New Mexico for the Manhattan Projects secret test detonation. Here he uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two mad geniuses who confronted the devastating power of twentieth-century science in very different ways. Both men travelled to New Mexico. Oppenheimer was honoured for buiding a bomb, the ancestor of weapons that have enslaved humanity. Warburg, condemned to obscurity and confined to a mental hospital, regained his sanity by studying the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southwest who, for thousands of years, practiced the ritual of the snake dance in an attempt to harness the power of lightening. And it was in New Mexico, at Los Alamos, that the ultimate act of playing God was realised.The circle is closed in Japan.. Faced with the catastrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in March 2011, scientific man, like the snake dancers, is faced with a power beyond his control. Spanning three continents and the history of civilisation, Snake Dance is at once an intrepid intellectual adventure and a wake-up call for mankind.

Enthralling and intelligent, a masterly exploration of the sinister labyrinth that was wartime France . . . It is a remarkable book, utterly fascinating. Allan MassieNot long after 2:00 p.m. on June 21, 1943, eight men met in secret at a doctor s house in Lyon. They represented the warring factions of the French Resistance and had been summoned by General de Gaulles new envoy, a man most of them knew simply as Max. Minutes after the last man entered the house, the Gestapo broke in, led by Klaus Barbie, the infamous Butcher of Lyon. The fate awaiting Barbies prisoners was torture, deportation, and death. Max was tortured sadistically but never broke: he took his many secrets to his grave. In that moment, the legend of Jean Moulin was born. Who betrayed Jean Moulin? And who was this enigmatic hero, a man as skilled in deception as he was in acts of heroism? After the war, his ashes were transferred to the PantheonFrances highest honorwhere his memory is revered alongside that of Voltaire and Victor Hugo. But Moulins story is full of unanswered questions: the truth of his life is far more complicated than the legend conveniently manufactured by de Gaulle. Resistance and Betrayal tells for the first time in English the epic story of Frances greatest war hero, a Schindler-like character of ambiguous motivation. A winner of the Marsh Prize for biography, praised by Graham Greene and Julian Barnes, Patrick Marnham is a brilliant storyteller with a keen appreciation for the complex maze of moral compromises navigated in times of war. Told with the drama and suspense of the best espionage fiction, Resistance and Betrayal brings to life the dark and duplicitous world of the French Resistance and offers a startling conclusion to one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Second World War.NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.