Kirjahaku

In this biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most exciting women in European medieval history, Boyd takes the reader to the heart of this extraordinary woman. He reveals her as a peculiarly "modern" character - she rejects as a liberated woman the subordinate role decreed by the Chruch and Salic law; she refused to be a consenting victim of ethnic cleansing; and she promotes her vision of a continent wide dynasty - and sets her into the context of southern French civilization, with its love of comforts and pleasures in life. The book not only recreates the turbulent life of this woman, but takes the reader into the world she knew - her friendships, the food she ate, the clothes she wore, the sounds, sights and smells around her.

In this new biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine - one of the most exciting women in European medieval history - author Douglas Boyd takes us to the heart of this extraordinary woman. He reveals her as a peculiarly 'modern' character - she rejects as a liberated woman the subordinate role decreed by the Church and Salic law; she refused to be a consenting victim of ethnic cleansing; and she promotes her vision of a continent wide dynasty - and uniquely sets her into the context of southern French civilisation, with its love of comforts and pleasures of life. Boyd's new biography will not only recreate the turbulent life of this extraordinary woman, but take us into the world she knew - her friendships, the food she ate, the clothes she wore, the sounds, sights and smells around her - and thus bring her to life as never before.

What was life really like in German-occupied France during the Second World War? Douglas Boyd paints the clearest picture yet, using hitherto unpublished first-person accounts of ordinary men and women who lived through this extraordinary and dangerous time, when a few made fortunes, but most went cold and hungry. Less than 1 per cent of the French was pro-German. Is it pure coincidence that the same percentage actively resisted the Germans despite knowing that, if caught, their husbands, wives and children were considered equally culpable under the brutal Teutonic principle of Sippenhaft - guilt by association? Using new, meticulously researched material, Douglas Boyd tells an enthralling and sometimes chilling narrative history of the Occupation, as lived by the French people. It is a record of great heroism and ultimate cruelty. Read it and ask yourself, 'How would I have reacted, living in Occupied France?' The answer may surprise you.

What did it mean when Vladimir Putin stepped down from president to prime minister of Russia in 2008 and bounced to the top again in 2013? The Putin-Medvedev clique of mega-rich ex-KGB men and lawyers call their state machine kontora – the firm – and run it as though they own all the shares. They command the largest armed forces in Europe, equipped with half the world’s nuclear warheads. Their air force regularly flies nuclear capable Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers into British airspace to analyse our radar defences and time in-the-air reaction. In a frightening foretaste of future warfare, the Kremlin launched a cyberattack on neighbouring Estonia in 2007 that crashed every computer and silenced every mobile phone, bringing the country to a complete halt. Was this just Tsar Vladimir bullying a small independent neighbour state that could not hit back – or a rehearsal for something far bigger? People call Putin’s power strategy ‘the new Cold War’. Author Douglas Boyd argues that it is the same one as before, fought with potent new weapons: the energy resources on which half of Europe now depends, and which can be turned off at Moscow’s whim. Recounted often in the words of participants, The Kremlin Conspiracy is the chilling story of 1,000 years of bloodshed that made the Russians the way they are. Today, Ukraine. Tomorrow? The past points the way, for the men running the Kremlin ‘firm’ are driven by the same motivation as Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great.

The key to getting on with our closest Continental neighbours is to know the truth about what they endured during the German Occupation in the Second World War. Forget the films and television dramas about the Resistance; here is the true picture of the Occupation. This often chilling history, based on previously unpublished accounts by men and women who lived through it, tells how they went cold and hungry while Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier made their fortunes. Whole towns were destroyed and thousands killed by British bombs. Collaboration earned Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval death sentences after the Liberation, whereas French police who sent thousands of women and children to the gas chambers at Auschwitz went unpunished, as did the gendarmes who guarded French concentration camps and handcuffed hostages for the firing squads. Over 70,000 children were fathered by German personnel in France while 1.6 million husbands and lovers languished in POW camps, but if only half the French women whose heads were shaved at the Liberation were accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’, what were the others punished for? And what about the many thousands of French lives saved by two courageous Germans?

When people think of Richard the Lionheart they recall the scene at the end of every Robin Hood epic when he returns from the Crusades to punish his treacherous brother John and the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. In reality Richard detested England and the English, was deeply troubled by his own sexuality and was noted for greed, not generosity, and for murder rather than mercy. In youth Richard showed a taste for cruelty and a rapacity for gold that would literally be the death of him. To save his own skin, he repeatedly abandoned his supporters, and his indifference to women saw the part of queen at his coronation played by his formidable mother, Queen Eleanor. His brief reign bankrupted England twice, destabilised his parents' powerful empire and set the scene for his brother’s ruinous rule.So how has Richard come to be known as the brave and patriotic Christian warrior? Lionheart reveals the scandalous truth about England’s hero king – a truth that is far different from the legend that has endured for eight centuries.

Winston Churchill called it ‘the unknown war’. Unlike the long stalemate of the Western Front, the conflict 1914–18 between the Russian Empire and the Central Powers was a war of movement spanning a continent – from the Arctic to the Adriatic, Black and Caspian seas and from the Baltic in the west to the Pacific Ocean.The appalling scale of casualties provoked strikes in Russia’s war industries and widespread mutinies at the front. As the whole fabric of society collapsed, German money brought the Bolsheviks to power in the greatest deniable dirty trick of the twentieth century, after which Russia stopped fighting, eight months before the Western Front armistice.The cost to Russia was 4 million men dead and as many held as POWs by the Central Powers. Wounded? No one has any idea how many. All the belligerent powers of the Russian fronts were destroyed: the German, Austro–Hungarian and Russian empires gone forever and the Ottoman Empire so crippled that it finally collapsed in 1922.During four years of brutal civil war that followed, Trotsky’s Red Army fought the White armies, murdering and massacring millions of civilians, as British, American and other western soldiers of the interventionist forces fought and died from the frozen Arctic to the arid deserts of Iran. This is the story of that other First World War.

Of the 2.3 million National Servicemen conscripted during the Cold War, 4,200 attended the secret Joint Services School for Linguists, tasked with supplying much-needed Russian speakers to the three services. The majority were in RAF uniform, as the Warsaw Pact saw air forces become the greatest danger to the West. After training, they were sent to the front lines in Germany and elsewhere to snoop on Russian aircraft in real time. Posted to RAF Gatow in Berlin, ideally placed for signals interception, Douglas Boyd came to know Hitler’s devastated former capital, divided as it was into Soviet, French, US and British sectors. Pulling no punches, he describes the SIGINT work, his subsequent arrest by armed Soviet soldiers one night on the border, and how he was locked up without trial in solitary confinement in a Stasi prison. The Solitary Spy is a unique account of the terrifying experience of incarceration and interrogation in an East German political prison, from which Boyd eventually escaped one step ahead of the KGB.

The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet propaganda pretended for several decades that it was ‘the will of the people’, but in reality the brutal rebellion, which killed millions and raised the numerically tiny Bolshevik Party to power, was made possible by massive injections of German money laundered through a Swedish bank. The so-called ‘workers’ and peasants’ revolution’ had a cast of millions, of which the three stars were neither workers nor peasants. Nor were they Russian. Josef V. Djugashvili – Stalin – was a Georgian who never did speak perfect Russian; Leiba Bronstein – Trotsky – was a Jewish Ukrainian; Vladimir I. Ulyanov – Lenin – was a mixture of Tatar and other Asiatic bloodlines. Karl Marx had thought that the Communist revolution would happen in an industrialised country like Germany. Instead, German cash enabled Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Co. to destroy ineffective tsarist rule and declare war on the whole world. This is how they did it, told largely in the words of people who were there.

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew. Large sections of the aircraft, bodies and personal effects crashed onto residential areas of Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the deaths of a further eleven people on the ground. The psychological damage to traumatised residents would take many years to disappear; in some cases, it never did. Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is the only person to have been convicted of the crime – though few believe that he acted alone and some believe him innocent. Author Douglas Boyd presents evidence that it was Iran, not Libya, which was responsible for the attack. On 3 July 1988 (less than six months before the Lockerbie bombing), Iran Air flight 655 was in Iranian airspace on a Bandar Abbas-Dubai flight when it was shot down by missiles from the USS Vincennes sailing illegally into Iranian territorial waters. Government leader Ayatollah Khomeini decreed that blood should flow in revenge. However, this line of enquiry was quietly closed and Libya declared guilty because the White House wanted neighbouring Syria and Iran on-side for the build-up to the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Lockerbie: The Truth at last reveals the facts about what happened on that awful night at Lockerbie.

After the guns fell silent in May 1945, the USSR resumed its clandestine warfare against the western democracies. Stalin installed secret police services in the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Trained by his NKVD officers of the Polish UB, the Czech StB, the Hungarian AVO, Romania’s Securitate, Bulgaria’s KDS, Albania’s Sigurimi and the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic spied on and ruthlessly repressed their fellow citizens on the Soviet model. When the resultant hatred exploded in uprisings they were put down by brutality, bloodshed and Soviet tanks. Not so obvious was that these state terror organisations were also designed for military and commercial espionage in the West, to conceal the real case officers in Moscow. Specially trained operatives undertook ‘wet jobs’, including the assassinations. Perhaps the most menacing were the sleepers who who married and raised families in the west while waiting to strike against their host countries; many are still among us.In Moscow Rules Douglas Boyd explores the relationship between the KGB and its ghastly brood – a family from hell.

Of the 2.3 million National Servicemen conscripted during the Cold War, 4,200 attended the secret Joint Services School for Linguists, tasked with supplying much-needed Russian speakers to the three services. After training, they were sent to the front lines in Germany and elsewhere to snoop on Soviet aircraft in real time.Posted to RAF Gatow in Berlin, ideally placed for signals interception, author Douglas Boyd came to know Hitler’s devastated former capital. Pulling no punches, he describes SIGINT work, his subsequent arrest by armed Soviet soldiers, and how he was locked up without trial in solitary confinement in a Stasi prison.The Solitary Spy is a unique first-hand account of the terrifying experience of incarceration and interrogation in an East German political prison, from which Boyd eventually escaped, one step ahead of the KGB.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was the only person ever to sit on the thrones of both France and England. In this account of the turbulent adventures of the extraordinary mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John, author Douglas Boyd takes us into the heart and mind of the woman who changed the shape of Europe for 300 years by marrying Henry of Anjou to make him England's Henry II. Brought up in the comfort- and culture-loving Mediterranean civilisation of southern France, she was a European with a continent-wide vision and a peculiarly 'modern' woman who rejected the subordinate female role decreed by the Church. In this biography, using French, Old French, Latin and Occitan sources, Douglas Boyd lays bare Eleanor's relationship and vividly brings her world to life.

D-Day, 6 June 1944; a day that has gone down in history as one of the most crucial steps towards Allied victory of the Second World War. But what is known of the thousands of young Frenchmen and women who were formed into small, untrained armies and used as bait by the Allied powers to distract the German forces from the invasion beaches? These civilians were scattered through the French forests and hill country, and they believed that Allied forces would arrive to help them drive the hated Nazi occupiers out of France; but this support never arrived. Instead they were abandoned, to be hunted down by collaborationist French paramilitaries, Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops. Those that were lucky died quickly; the unlucky ones survived – they were brutally raped and tortured before being shot, or were deported to death camps in Germany. With rare, striking and often harrowing photographs of the people, places and events of this period, Boyd reveals the startling truth of the prologue to the D-Day landings, highlighting atrocities that should never be forgotten.

When people think of Richard the Lionheart they recall the scene at the end of every Robin Hood epic when he returns from the Crusades to punish his treacherous brother John and the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. In reality Richard detested England and the English, was deeply troubled by his own sexuality and was noted for greed, not generosity, and for murder rather than mercy. In youth Richard showed no interest in girls; instead, a taste for cruelty and a rapacity for gold that would literally be the death of him. To save his own skin, he repeatedly abandoned his supporters to an evil fate, and his indifference to women saw the part of queen at his coronation played by his formidable mother, Queen Eleanor. His brief reign bankrupted England twice, destabilised the powerful empire his parents had put together and set the scene for his brother’s ruinous rule.So how has Richard come to be known as the noble Christian warrior associated with such bravery and patriotism? Lionheart reveals the scandalous truth about England’s hero king – a truth that is far different from the legend that has endured for eight centuries.

Lore Schindler was ten years old when her dentist father Harry was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His wife Grete bought his release by giving all their possessions to the Nazi state. Leaving Germany with just 10 Marks each, parents and daughter suffered humiliating strip searches at the border. This was the start of Lore's ordeal. In her first French concentration camp, her mother died. Her father also died in another camp. Orphaned and ill in the huge camp at Gurs, she was saved by prisoner-nurse Schwester Kate, but would later have starved to death, had not two sisters - Elsie and Marthe Liefmann - 'adopted' her, found food and made her eat it. Elsbeth Kasser was a Swiss-German social worker in the camp who gave her treats of milk and Swiss cheese to build up 'the thinnest girl in the camp'. Another social worker, Elisabeth Hirsch used a forged identity card to get Lore out of the camp and took her to La Maison de Moissac, a children's home in SW France run by her sister Shatta Simon. There, several hundred refugee children were hidden from the Nazi occupiers and French fascists who wanted to send the children to the death camps in Poland. When it became unsafe to stay in Moissac, Lore was adopted by pianist Helene Gribenski, living in a remote village. When that too became unsafe, she moved her little family into a primitive hovel in the forest to await the Allied victory. That Lore survived was due to these courageous women, who risked their own lives to save hers. After the war, she found love in an Israeli kibbutz and moved with her American husband to New York, becoming a librarian with Brooklyn Public Library. No borrowers ever guessed what her adolescence and burgeoning womanhood had been like in a terrifying land whose language she could not even speak.

When Count Henry of Anjou and his formidable wife Eleanor of Aquitaine became king and queen of England, they amassed an empire stretching 1,000 miles from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border, including half of France. Henry's grandmother Empress (of Germany) Mathilda had taught him that ruling is like venery: show the hawk the reward, but take it away at the last moment, to keep the bird eager to please. To sons and vassals alike, Henry promised everything but gave nothing, keeping the three adult princes hating him and the other siblings all their lives. Plantagenet Princes traces the lives and infamous webs of mistrust and intrigue among them. What sons they were! Henry (b. 1155), 'the Young king' was entitled to succeed his father, yet was a rich playboy who died crippled by debt before his thirtieth birthday, after living the life of a robber baron. Richard (b. 1157), 'the Lionheart' was lord of his mother's duchy of Aquitaine and became, thanks to her, England's most popular king despite bankrupting the Empire twice in his disastrous 10-year reign. Geoffrey (b. 1158), count of Brittany, was the cleverest, but was trampled to death by horses aged 32 in a pointless melee at Paris, leaving his wife Constance to act as regent for their son Arthur in a long power struggle between Philip Augustus, king of France, and the Plantagenets. The runt of the litter, John (b. 1166) was nicknamed Lackland, since no inheritance was initially promised him. He proved the longest-lived by far, dying at the age of fifty after signing Magna Carta, losing the key duchy of Normandy and most of the other continental possessions - also murdering his nephew Arthur, imprisoning Arthur's sister for life and waging war against his barons, continued by Henry III. The Plantagenet line continued with Richard of Cornwall, Edward I conquering Wales, gay Edward II, Edward III, Edward the Black Prince and Richard II, who died in prison while his usurper sat on the throne.

The names of few medieval monarchs and their queens are better known than Eleanor of Aquitaine, uniquely queen of France and queen of England, and her second husband Henry II. Although academically labelled medieval', their era was the violent transition from the Dark Ages, when countries' borders were defined with fire and sword. Henry grabbed the English throne thanks largely to Eleanor's dowry because she owned one third of France. Their daughters also lived extraordinary lives. If princes fought for their succession to crowns, the princesses were traded - usually by their mothers - to strangers for political power without the bloodshed. Years before what would today be marriageable age, royal girls were despatched to countries whose speech was unknown to them and there became the property of unknown men; their duty the bearing of sons to continue a dynasty and daughters who would be traded in their turn. Some became literal prisoners of their spouses; others outwitted would-be rapists and the Church to seize the reins of power when their husbands died. Eleanor's daughters Marie and Alix were abandoned in Paris when she divorced Louis VII of France. By Henry II, she bore Matilda, Alienor and Joanna. Between them, these extraordinary women and their daughters knew the extremes of power and pain. Joanna was imprisoned by William II of Sicily and worse treated by her brutal second husband in Toulouse. If Eleanor was libelled as a whore, Alienor's descendants include two saints, Louis of France and Fernando of Spain. And then there were the illegitimate daughters, whose lives read like novels

The names of few medieval monarchs and their queens are better known than Eleanor of Aquitaine, uniquely queen of France and queen of England, and her second husband Henry II. Although academically labelled ‘medieval’, their era was the violent transition from the Dark Ages, when countries’ borders were defined with fire and sword. Henry grabbed the English throne thanks largely to Eleanor’s dowry because she owned one third of France. Their daughters also lived extraordinary lives. If princes fought for their succession to crowns, the princesses were traded – usually by their mothers – to strangers for political power without the bloodshed. Years before what would today be marriageable age, royal girls were despatched to countries whose speech was unknown to them and there became the property of unknown men; their duty the bearing of sons to continue a dynasty and daughters who would be traded in their turn. Some became literal prisoners of their spouses; others outwitted would-be rapists and the Church to seize the reins of power when their husbands died. Eleanor’s daughters Marie and Alix were abandoned in Paris when she divorced Louis VII of France. By Henry II, she bore Matilda, Aliénor and Joanna. Between them, these extraordinary women and their daughters knew the extremes of power and pain. Joanna was imprisoned by William II of Sicily and worse treated by her brutal second husband in Toulouse. If Eleanor was libelled as a whore, Aliénor’s descendants include two saints, Louis of France and Fernando of Spain. And then there were the illegitimate daughters, whose lives read like novels…

When Count Henry of Anjou and his formidable wife Eleanor of Aquitaine became king and queen of England, they amassed an empire stretching 1,000 miles from the Pyrenees to the Scottish border, including half of France. Henry’s grandmother Empress (of Germany) Mathilda had taught him that ruling is like venery: show the hawk the reward, but take it away at the last moment, to keep the bird eager to please. To sons and vassals alike, Henry promised everything but gave nothing, keeping the three adult princes hating him and the other siblings all their lives. Plantagenet Princes traces the lives and infamous webs of mistrust and intrigue among them. What sons they were! Henry (b. 1155), ‘the Young king’ was entitled to succeed his father, yet was a rich playboy who died crippled by debt before his thirtieth birthday, after living the life of a robber baron. Richard (b. 1157), ‘the Lionheart’ was lord of his mother’s duchy of Aquitaine and became, thanks to her, England’s most popular king despite bankrupting the Empire twice in his disastrous 10-year reign. Geoffrey (b. 1158), count of Brittany, was the cleverest, but was trampled to death by horses aged 32 in a pointless mêlée at Paris, leaving his wife Constance to act as regent for their son Arthur in a long power struggle between Philip Augustus, king of France, and the Plantagenets. The runt of the litter, John (b. 1166) was nicknamed Lackland, since no inheritance was initially promised him. He proved the longest-lived by far, dying at the age of fifty after signing Magna Carta, losing the key duchy of Normandy and most of the other continental possessions – also murdering his nephew Arthur, imprisoning Arthur’s sister for life and waging war against his barons, continued by Henry III. The Plantagenet line continued with Richard of Cornwall, Edward I conquering Wales, gay Edward II, Edward III, Edward the Black Prince and Richard II, who died in prison while his usurper sat on the throne.