Lust & Wonder A Memoir

Paul Preston (Author)

Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco's Spain

A TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR From the preeminent historian of 20th century Spain Paul Preston, Architects of Terror is a new history of how paranoia, conspiracy and anti-Semitism was used to justify the military coup of 1936 and enabled the construction of a dictatorship built on violence and persecution. It is the previously untold story of how antisemitic beliefs were weaponised to justify and propagate the Franco overthrow of liberal Spain.The Spanish military coup of 1936 was launched to overturn the social and economic reforms of the democratic Second Republic, and its educational and cultural challenges to the established order. The consequent civil war was fought in the interests of the landowners, industrialists, bankers, clerics and army officers whose privileges were threatened. However, a central justification for a war that took the lives of around 500,000 Spaniards was that it was being fought to combat an alleged scheme for world domination by a non-existent 'Jewish- Masonic-Bolshevik Conspiracy'. Despite the fact that Spain had only a tiny minority of Jews and Freemasons, Franco and his inner circle were ardent believers in this fabricated conspiracy and spread ...

Fin Dwyer (Author)

A History of Ireland in 20 Murders

The Instant Top 5 Irish Times Bestseller From the creator of The Irish History Podcast comes a fascinating look at Irish history through the lens of murder. In A Lethal Legacy, Fin Dwyer charts 200 years of Irish history, opening up our past as never before, by observing the grand societal changes of our times through the intimate lens of eighteen murders and the lives and communities they altered forever.From the creator of the critically acclaimed Irish History Podcast comes a ground-breaking exploration of the past, casting its gaze beyond the chambers of power and carnage of battle, and into the lives of the everyday people that lived through those violent centuries. From the desperate retributions of the Land War of the nineteenth century, through the unprecedented tumult of the revolutionary years, to the causes that helped to shape contemporary Ireland, these previously overlooked cases of human tragedy offer a fresh perspective on a history we think we know.Astonishing, illuminating and compelling, A Lethal Legacy chronicles Ireland's turbulent past through one of our most enduring fascinations - the act of killing - and in mapping the causes and aftermath of these cases, ...

Frances E. Dolan

Whores of Babylon: Catholicism Gender and Seventeenth Centu

In Whores of Babylon , Frances E. Dolan offers a perceptive study of the central role that Catholics and Catholicism played in early modern English law, literature, and politics. She contends that despite sharing the same blood, origins, and history as their Protestant antagonists, Catholics provoked more prolific and intemperate visual and verbal representation, and more elaborate and sustained legal regulation, than any other marginal group in seventeenth-century England. This careful and thorough study examines legal and literary representations of the "Catholic menace" during three crises in Protestant/Catholic relations, from the Gunpowder Plot (1605) to the Popish Plot and Meal Tub Plot (1678-80). It also offers the first sustained analysis of the extent to which gender issues informed both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in the early modern period. Available for the first time in paperback, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern England, Catholic history, and gender studies.