Adrian Searle – författare

Its been a State secret for more than seventy years. The official line in the UK has always been that it never happened but this new work challenges the assertion that no German force set foot on British soil during the Second World War (the Channel Islands excepted), on active military service.Churchills Last Wartime Secret reveals the remarkable story of a mid-war seaborne enemy raid on an Isle of Wight radar station. It describes the purpose and scope of the attack, the composition of the raiding German force and how it was immediately, and understandably, hushed-up by Winston Churchills wartime administration, in order to safeguard public morale.Circumventing the almost complete lack of official British archival documentation, the author relies on compelling and previously undisclosed first-hand evidence from Germany to underpin the books narrative and claims; thus distinguishing it from other tales of rumoured seaborne enemy assaults on British soil during the 1939-45 conflict.After examining the outcome and repercussions of this astonishing incident, what emerges is an event of major symbolic significance in the annals of wartime history.

She was the daughter of an alcoholic Isle of Wight smuggler. Much of her childhood was spent in the island's workhouse. Yet Sophie Dawes threw off the shackles of her downbeat formative years to become one of the most talked-about personalities in post-revolutionary France.It was the ultimate rags to riches story which would see her become the mistress of the fabulously wealthy French aristocrat Louis Henri de Bourbon, destined to be the last Prince of Conde.Her total subjugation of the ageing prince, her obsessive desire for a position among the highest echelon of French royalist society following the Bourbon restoration, and her designs upon a hefty chunk of Louis Henri's vast fortune would lead to scandal, sensation and then infamyThe Infamous Sophie Dawes takes an in-depth look at her island background before tracing her extraordinary rise from obscurity to becoming a baroness who ruled the prince's chateau at Chantilly as its unofficial queen and intrigued with the King of the French to get what she wanted.But how far did she go? The book examines the mysterious death of Louis Henri in 1830 and uses newly discovered evidence in a bid to determine the part Sophie may have played in his demise.