Search results for ""Author Douglas Boyd""
The History Press Ltd Moscow Rules: Secret Police, Spies, Sleepers, Assassins
After the guns fell silent in May 1945, the USSR resumed its clandestine warfare against the western democracies. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin installed secret police services in all the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Trained by his NKVD – a predecessor of the KGB – 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 (GDR) spied on and ruthlessly repressed their fellow citizens on the Soviet model. When the resultant hatred exploded in uprisings – in GDR 1953, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 – they were put down by brutality, bloodshed and Soviet tanks. What was at first 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 mokrye dyela or ‘wet jobs’, including assassination of émigrés and other anti-Soviet figures. Perhaps the most menacing were the sleepers who settled in the West, married and had children while waiting to strike against their host countries. Many of them are still among us. Here, historian and author Douglas Boyd explores for the first time the relationship between the KGB and its ghastly brood of ‘daughters’ – a true family from hell.
£10.99
The History Press Ltd The Kremlin Conspiracy: 1,000 Years of Russian Expansionism
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.
£12.99
Ian Allan Publishing Normandy in the Time of Darkness Everyday Life and Death in the French Channel Ports 194045
£6.59
The History Press Ltd The Other First World War: The Blood-Soaked Russian Fronts 1914-1922
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.
£16.99
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Saving the Schindlers' Daughter: How Courageous Women Rescued an Orphaned Girl from French Concentration Camps
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.
£20.00
The History Press Ltd Female Secret Agents
Forget the adventure stories of James Bond, Kim Philby, Klaus Fuchs and co. – espionage is not just a boys’ game. As long as there has been conflict, there have been female agents behind the scenes. In Belgium and northern France in 1914–18 there were several thousand women actively working against the Kaiser’s forces occupying their homelands. In the Second World War, women of many nations opposed the Nazis, risking the firing squad or decapitation by axe or guillotine. Yet, many of those women did not have the right to vote for a government or even open a bank account. So why did they do it?Female Secret Agents explores the lives and the motivations of the women of many races and social classes who have risked their lives as secret agents, and celebrates their intelligence, strength and courage.
£14.99
The History Press Ltd Red October: The Revolution that Changed the World
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.
£18.00
The History Press Ltd Lionheart: The True Story of England's Crusader King
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.
£12.99
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Plantagenet Princes: Sons of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II
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.
£19.99
The History Press Ltd Lionheart: The True Story of England's Crusader King
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.
£17.99
The History Press Ltd The Solitary Spy: A Political Prisoner in Cold War Berlin
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.
£12.99
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Plantagenet Princesses: The Daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II
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
£22.50