Patrick Marnham

Biography of Mary Farmar, a descendant of the Duke of Wellington, who married first Baron Swinfen and then Eric Siepmann. She started writing seriously at the age of 70 under the pen name of Mary Wesley to stave off poverty. Between the ages of 70 and 85 she produced a series of best sellers including "The Camomile Lawn", which appear to include significant autobiographical elements. Her life in pre-war and wartime Britain was remarkable, and almost scandalous. Her friends provided first hand experience of pre-war Europe, and then of the post war challenges that followed. A fascinating window into upper middle class Britain of the time.

"Patrick Marnham set out originally to write 'an uncontroversial biography of a very brave man' but the research he began more than a decade ago uncovered a far more fascinating and ambivalent figure. It took Marnham from the Provencal village where Jean Moulin spent his childhood, through the scenes of his career and his bohemian life as an artist in Montparnasse, right up to the doctor's room in Caluire where he was sitting when Klaus Barbie's Gestapo burst through the door and where, in 1985, Marnham interviewed the doctor himself. Marnham's biographical detection discloses a plot within a plot and summarizes the evidence as to who actually killed Jean Moulin. He also describes how an heroic legend was manufactured to take the place of an heroic life."--BOOK JACKET.

Not 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 Gaulle's 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 Barbie's 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 Pantheon -- France's highest honor -- where his memory is revered alongside that of Voltaire and Victor Hugo. But Moulin's 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 France's greatest war hero, a Schindler-like character of ambiguous motivation. 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. - Jacket flap.

Overshadowed by the cataclysmic Civil War only thirteen years later, the Mexican War has been practically forgotten in the United States. Through the years, despite our growing interest in Mexico, it is rarely mentioned. And when the subject comes up, it nearly always deals with the questionable manner in which it came about. More specifically, was the United States right in sending Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande in early 1846, thus provoking war with Mexico? Opinions vary. The omission of such events as the Mexican War from the American consciousness does history injustice. Wars as such may best be forgotten, but the period of the Mexican War was an important era, one of upheaval, of passion, of heroism, of bitterness, and of triumph. The cost in American lives was staggering. Of the 104,556 men who served in the army, both regulars and volunteers, 13,768 men died, the highest death rate of any war in our history. The period between 1844 and 1848 was a significant time, not something to be relegated to the attic of memory. The fact is that Mexico stood in the way of the American dream of Manifest Destiny. Although that dramatic, pious term was of relatively recent coinage in 1845, the idea of expansion westward to the Pacific had long been in the American mind. It is generally assumed that the annexation of Texas to the Union, finally accomplished on July 4, 1845, was the cause of the war between the United States and Mexico in 1846. But the act of annexation itself was an artificial issue, and even after annexation had been accomplished, war might have been averted. Looking back, one is tempted to consider the outcome of the Mexican War as a foregone conclusion, to regard the unbroken string of North American victories as easy. It was not so; the success of American arms represented a remarkable feat. Because of language, distance, and, above all, the paucity of Mexican writing on the Mexican War, this story is told largely from the North American viewpoint. The general relationship between Mexico and the United States is beyond the scope of this book. However, the effect of the Mexican War on that relationship has been my preoccupation in writing it. I hope that this effort will assist in an evaluation of the Mexican War as a significant event of history. - Introduction.

"Mary Wesley published her first novel in 1983 when she was seventy years old - and went on to write nine bestsellers, including The Camomile Lawn, which was made into a TV series." "Wesley was a pen name, derived from the family name of Wellesley. She was born Mary Farmar, related to the Duke of Wellington, and grew up a rebel who believed that she was her mother's least favourite child. Like many girls of her background, she married for escape. She herself summarised the pre-War years as 'God! When I think of the time I've wasted going to bed with old Etonians.' Her first marriage (to Lord Swinfen) was brief and conventional. In the late 1930s, she began a fascination with Heinz Ziegler, a Czech university professor and wartime air gunner; his brother, Paul, later a Benedictine monk, also fell under her spell. In 1944, she met her adored second husband, Eric Siepmann, a writer who never managed to make any money at all from writing. Their marriage, which was mercurial and bohemian, lasted until his death. In her later years she enjoyed a relationship with playwright Robert Bolt." "At the outbreak of the Second World War she was, as she put it, 'roped into Intelligence', where she worked on breaking codes. MI5 and her rackety life during the Blitz eventually inspired her novels, many of which were concerned with multiple wartime love affairs. She wrote about the atmosphere of the home front and how the imminence of death loosened inhibitions - her fiction was as sexy and as candid as she was herself. She drew on her eccentric friends and her love of Cornwall and the West Country, while the darkness in her novels was illuminated by a caustic sense of the ridiculous. Her style has been described as arsenic without the old lace."--Jacket.