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  John Fleming and Hugh Honour...

  Susanna Johnston

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  The prodigiously gifted John Fleming and Hugh Honour were the last titans of art history, living in a beautiful, secluded Italian villa that cocooned their private lives as their world fame grew. To Susanna Johnston, however, they were simply John and Hugh, an inseparable couple and two of her closest friends. They had met at Gli Scafari, the opulent villa on the Italian Riviera of the blind writer Percy Lubbock - one of Henry James' inamoratos and Iris Origo's step father - when she was twenty one, on holiday, penniless and in need of a job. John and Hugh had convinced Percy that she would take over as his reading companion despite being a girl, and she thus freed them to embark on careers that would propagate their wide-ranging enthusiasms and rigorous knowledge, enriching the lives of millions of art lovers.
  Originally part of the Anglo-Italian world orbiting Bernard Berenson's I Tatti and Harold Acton's La Pietra, John Fleming and Hugh Honour were bemused by being lionised by the super-rich who beat a path to their Villa Marchio. Privately poking merciless fun at this (to them) puzzling phenomenon, their reluctance to engage with the outside world increased precipitously following a traumatic burglary in the 1980s, just as they won prestigious prize after prize, when two truck loads of priceless, meticulously-collected but uninsured works of art were pillaged from their secluded villa. This candid memoir, full of private anecdotes, illuminates these two celebrated, passionate, and very English geniuses, through a close-up of a well-seasoned friendship of over 60 years.

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  Out of Sight Out of Mind - Why...

  John Podmore

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  At the heart of his book is his conclusion that prison simply does not work, failing on three fundamental levels. The view of the popular media is that when prisoners are locked up they cannot commit crime. This is not true. Podmore shows how crime actually proliferates in prison, how serious organised crime is allowed to flourish there through bad management, and how the UK's prisons are a multi-million pound investment bank for the black economy. The public sees prison as a deterrent. This book shows that whilst it may deter the white, middle classes, for the majority of those behind bars it is merely a social tax, or as Norman Stanley Fletcher was told in Porridge, 'an occupational hazard'. It shows that for many across the spectrum of social exclusion it is a place of safety and preferable to life on the streets. Also, whatever spin is put on the figures it is clear that the majority of those leaving prison will quickly reoffend. OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND is a remarkable book that seeks to ignite a debate across society about a vital subject we ignore at our peril.

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  New national park celebrates...

  PBS NewsHour

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  After Harriet Tubman, famed conductor of the Underground Railroad, rescued dozens of people from slavery and served in the Civil War, she settled down in the small city of Auburn in upstate New York and continued a life of service. The National Park Service recently made her property a national park, celebrating the later chapters of her life. NewsHour Weekend's Megan Thompson reports.

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  The Ring of Nine

  Vasily Kuznetsov

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  The Soviets. Allies during the war, enemies shortly after. One of them talks about one of the most harrowing chapters of human history in general and World War Two in particular - the Siege of Leningrad. 
  The Ring of Nine is a first-person account of the Leningrad Blockade during World War II, translated by Maria K. This work started off as a series of journals written by Maria's late grandfather, Vasily Petrovich Kuznetsov, as he experienced these events.

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  The Long Surrender

  Burke Davis

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  A panoramic and spellbinding history of the last days of the Confederacy and the flight, capture, and imprisonment of Jefferson Davis In April 1865, Richmond fell to the Union army and Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to his Northern counterpart, Ulysses S. Grant, at the Appomattox Court House. But the Civil War was far from over. Determined to keep Confederate dreams of secession alive, President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fled the burning capital city. With Union troops in pursuit, the fugitives rallied loyalists across the South and made plans to escape to Cuba. In the aftermath of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, a $100,000 bounty was placed on Davis’s head. Finally captured in Irwinville, Georgia, the former US senator and secretary of war became a prisoner of the American government. The harsh treatment he received would inflame tensions between North and South for years to come. Meticulously researched and brilliantly told, The Long Surrender brings these dramatic events to vivid, unforgettable life and paints a fascinating portrait of Davis, one of history’s most enigmatic figures. By shining a light on this forgotten chapter of the Civil War, bestselling author Burke Davis examines the lasting impact of America’s bloodiest conflict on the national character.

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  I Never Did Like Politics - How...

  Terry Golway

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  Fiorello LaGuardia was one of the twentieth century's most colorful politicians—on the New York and national stage. He was also quintessentially American: the son of Italian immigrants, who rose in society through sheer will and chutzpah. Almost one hundred years later, America is once again grappling with issues that would have been familiar to the Little Flower, as he was affectionately known. It's time to bring back LaGuardia, argues historian and journalist Terry Golway, to remind us all what an effective municipal officer (as he preferred to call himself) can achieve . . . Golway examines LaGuardia's extraordinary career through four essential qualities: As a patriot, a dissenter, a leader, and a statesman. He needed them all when he stood against the nativism, religious and racial bigotry, and reactionary economic policies of the 1920s, and again when he faced the realities of Depression-era New York and the rise of fascism at home and abroad in the 1930s. Just before World War II, the Roosevelt administration formally apologized to the Nazis when LaGuardia referred to Hitler as a "brown-shirted fanatic."There was nobody quite like Fiorello LaGuardia. In this immensely listenable book, as entertaining as the man himself, Terry Golway captures the enduring appeal of one of America's greatest leaders.

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