Edda Mussolini was Benito's favourite daughter: spoilt, venal, uneducated but clever, faithless but flamboyant, a brilliant diplomat, wild but brave, and ultimately strong and loyal.She was her father's confidante during the 20 years of Fascist rule, acting as envoy to both Germany and Britain, and playing a part in steering Italy to join forces with Hitler. From her early twenties she was effectively first lady of Italy. She married Galeazzo Ciano, who would become the youngest Foreign Secretary in Italian history, and they were the most celebrated and glamorous couple in elegant, vulgar Roman fascist society.Their fortunes turned in 1943, when Ciano voted against Mussolini in a plot to bring him down, and his father-in-law did not forgive him. In a dramatic story that takes in hidden diaries, her father's fall and her husband's execution, an escape into Switzerland and a period in exile, we come to know a complicated, bold and determined woman who emerges not just as a witness but as a key player in some of the twentieth century's defining moments. And we see Fascist Italy with all its glamour, decadence and political intrigue, and the turbulence before its violent end.
The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Resistance Quartet returns with the incredible story of Mussolini's daughter, Edda, one of the most influential women in 1930s Italy and a powerful proponent of the fascist movement.Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce's Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy's fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy's aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Caroline Moore's fascinating history. The issues that emerge reveal not only a great deal about the power of fascism, but also the ease with which dictatorship so easily took hold in a country weakened by war and a continent mired in chaos and desperate for peace.Drawing on a wealth of archival material, some newly released, along with memoirs and personal papers, Mussolini's Daughter paints a portrait of a woman in her twenties whose sheer force of character and ruthless narcissism helped impose a brutal and vulgar movement on a pliable and complicit society. Yet as Moorehead shows, not even Edda's colossal willpower, her scheming, nor her father's avowed love could save her husband from Mussolini's brutal vengeance.As she did in her Resistance Quartet, Moorehead delves deep into the past, exploring what fascism felt like to those living under it, how it blossomed and grew, and how fascists and aristocrats joined forces to pursue ten years of extravagance, amorality, and excessive luxury?greed, excess, and ambition that set the world on fire. The result is a powerful portrait of a young woman who played a key role in one of the most terrifying and violent periods in human history.
A thrilling biography of Edda Mussolini?Benito Mussolini's favorite daughter, one of the most influential women in 1930s Europe?and a heart-stopping account of the unraveling of the Fascist dream in Italy, from award-winning historian and author of the acclaimed Resistance Quartet, Caroline Moorehead ?Reads like a page-turning thriller.??BookPageEdda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce's Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy's fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy's aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Moorehead's fascinating history. The issues that emerge reveal not only a great deal about the power of fascism, but also the ease with which dictatorship so easily took hold in a country weakened by war and a continent mired in chaos and desperate for peace.Drawing on a wealth of archival material, some newly released, along with memoirs and personal papers, Mussolini's Daughter paints a portrait of a woman in her twenties whose sheer force of character and ruthless narcissism helped impose a brutal and vulgar movement on a pliable and complicit society. Yet as Moorehead shows, not even Edda's colossal willpower, her scheming, nor her father's avowed love could save her husband from Mussolini's brutal vengeance.As she did in her Resistance Quartet, Moorehead delves deep into the past, exploring what fascism felt like to those living under it, how it blossomed and grew, and how fascists and aristocrats joined forces to pursue ten years of extravagance, amorality, and excessive luxury?greed, excess, and ambition that set the world on fire. The result is a powerful portrait of a young woman who played a key role in one of the most terrifying and violent periods in human history.
From the author of the New York Times bestseller A Train in Winter comes the absorbing story of a French village that helped save thousands hunted by the Gestapo during World War IItold in full for the first time.Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village of scattered houses high in the mountains of the Ardche, one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Eastern France. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of this tiny mountain village and its parishes saved thousands wanted by the Gestapo: resisters, freemasons, communists, OSS and SOE agents, and Jews. Many of those they protected were orphaned children and babies whose parents had been deported to concentration camps.With unprecedented access to newly opened archives in France, Britain, and Germany, and interviews with some of the villagers from the period who are still alive, Caroline Moorehead paints an inspiring portrait of courage and determination: of what was accomplished when a small group of people banded together to oppose their Nazi occupiers. A thrilling and atmospheric tale of silence and complicity, Village of Secrets reveals how every one of the inhabitants of Chambon remained silent in a country infamous for collaboration. Yet it is also a story about mythmaking, and the fallibility of memory.A major contribution to WWII history, illustrated with black-and-white photos, Village of Secrets sets the record straight about the events in Chambon, and pays tribute to a group of heroic individuals, most of them women, for whom saving others became more important than their own lives.
Her canvases were the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the Great Terror; America at the time of Washington and Jefferson; Paris under the Directoire and then under Napoleon; Regency London; the battle of Waterloo; and, for the last years of her life, the Italian ducal courts. She witnessed firsthand the demise of the French monarchy, the wave of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, and the precipitous rise and fall of Napoleon. Lucie Dillon?a daughter of French and British nobility known in France by her married name, Lucie de la Tour du Pin?was the chronicler of her age. In this compelling biography, Caroline Moorehead illuminates the extraordinary life and remarkable achievements of this strong, witty, elegant, opinionated, and dynamic woman who survived personal tragedy and the devastation wrought by momentous historic events.
Iris Origo was one of the twentieth century's most attractive and intriguing women, a brilliantly perceptive historian and biographer whose works remain widely admired. Iris grew up in Italy with her Irish mother after the death of her wealthy American father. They settled in the Villa Medici in Florence, where they became part of the colourful and privileged Anglo-Florentine set that included Edith Wharton, Harold Acton and the Berensons.When Iris married Antonio Origo, they bought and revived La Foce, a derelict stretch of the beautiful Val d'Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate that thrives to this day. During World War II they sided firmly with the Allies, taking considerable risks in protecting children and sheltering partisans and Iris's diary from that time, War in Val d'Orcia, is now considered a modern classic.Caroline Moorehead has drawn on many previously unpublished letters, diaries, and papers to write the definitive biography of a very remarkable woman.
The acclaimed author of A Train in Winter returns with the "e;moving finale"e; (TheEconomist) of her Resistance Quartetthe powerful and inspiring true story of the women of the partisan resistance who fought against Italys fascist regime during World War II.In the late summer of 1943, when Italy broke with the Germans and joined the Allies after suffering catastrophic military losses, an Italian Resistance was born. Four young Piedmontese womenAda, Frida, Silvia and Biancaliving secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risked their lives to overthrow Italys authoritarian government. They were among the thousands of Italians who joined the Partisan effort to help the Allies liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made this partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of womenlike this brave quartetwho swelled its ranks.The bloody civil war that ensued pitted neighbor against neighbor, and revealed the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together into a coherent fighting force. But the death rattle of Mussolinis two decades of Fascist rulewith its corruption, greed, and anti-Semitismwas unrelentingly violent and brutal. Drawing on a rich cache of previously untranslated sources, prize-winning historian Caroline Moorehead illuminates the experiences of Ada, Frida, Silvia, and Bianca to tell the little-known story of the women of the Italian partisan movement fighting for freedom against fascism in all its forms, while Europe collapsed in smoldering ruins around them.
The untold story of the 999 young, unmarried Jewish women who were tricked into boarding a train in Poprad, Slovakia on March 25, 1942 that became the first official transport to Auschwitz.
Mussolini was not only ruthless: he was subtle and manipulative. Among those whose disgust hardened into bold and uncompromising resistance to Mussolini was a family from Florence: Amelia, Carlo and Nello Rosselli. The authorA's research deals with their loves, their loyalties, their laughter and their ultimate sacrifice.
Born Lucie Dillon, to a half-French mother and an Anglo-Irish father, her world was Versailles and the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Mixing politics and court intrigue, this title paints a portrait of an era that saw the fortunes of France, as well as those of Lucie herself, rise and fall and rise again.
Discover the life of one of the twentieth century's most significant and notorious war correspondents. Martha Gellhorn's journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century;
A new edition of this seminal book, now with a new introduction by the author on the current crisisHow can society cope with the diaspora of the twenty-first century?
A perennially interesting story, that always captures the imagination.
During the Nazi occupation, the inhabitants of the Plateau Vivarais Lignon saved several thousand people from the concentration camps. This book tells a story of courage and determination, of a small number of heroic individuals who risked their lives to save others, and of what can be done when people come together to oppose tyranny.
On an icy dawn morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. This title presents the story of these women.
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