Frances Stonor Saunders – författare

During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, they were expected to turn out works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost. This book documents the extraordinary energy of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West became instruments - whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not - of America's secret service.

The hugely acclaimed, best-selling life of Hawkwood, one of the outstanding figures of English and European history.John Hawkwood was an Essex man who became the greatest mercenary in an age when soldiers of fortune flourished - an age that also witnessed the first stirrings of the Renaissance. When England made a peace treaty with the French in 1360, during a pause in the Hundred Years War, John Hawkwood, instead of going home, travelled south to Avignon, where the papacy was based during its exile from Rome. He and his fellow mercenaries held the pope to ransom and were paid off. Hawkwood then crossed the Alps into Italy and found himself in a promised land: he made and lost fortunes extorting money from city states like Florence, Siena, and Milan, who were fighting vicious wars between themselves and against the popes.This man of war husbanded his use of violence, but for all his caution he committed one of the most notorious massacres of his time - an atrocity that still clouds his name.

A gripping account of the life and fate of the woman who almost assassinated Benito Mussolini.7 April 1926: on the steps of the Capitol in Rome, surrounded by chanting Fascists, The Honourable Violet Gibson raises her old revolver and fires at the Italian head of state, Benito Mussolini - the darling of Europe's ruling class. The bullet narrowly misses the dictator's bald head, hitting him in the nose. Of all his would-be assassins, she came closest to changing the course of history.What brought her to this moment? The daughter of an Anglo-Irish lord, she had once consorted with royalty and the peerage. Yet terrible unhappiness lurked beneath that glittering surface. She loved Italy and when Mussolini's thugs took it into the moral cesspit of Fascism, she felt she had to act.She paid for it for the rest of her life, confined to a lunatic asylum, like other difficult women of her class. Frances Stonor Saunders' moving and compulsively readable book rescues this gentle, driven woman from a silent void and restores her dignity and purpose.

The hugely acclaimed, best-selling life of Hawkwood, one of the outstanding figures of English and European history.John Hawkwood was an Essex man who became the greatest mercenary in an age when soldiers of fortune flourished - an age that also witnessed the first stirrings of the Renaissance. When England made a peace treaty with the French in 1360, during a pause in the Hundred Years War, John Hawkwood, instead of going home, travelled south to Avignon, where the papacy was based during its exile from Rome. He and his fellow mercenaries held the pope to ransom and were paid off. Hawkwood then crossed the Alps into Italy and found himself in a promised land: he made and lost fortunes extorting money from city states like Florence, Siena, and Milan, who were fighting vicious wars between themselves and against the popes.This man of war husbanded his use of violence, but for all his caution he committed one of the most notorious massacres of his time - an atrocity that still clouds his name.

*Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2022*'This is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind' Sunday TimesIf you open that suitcase you'll never close it again.Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life.So begins a captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stoner Saunders decides to unpick her family's past.

During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not.Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA's] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA's undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA's astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.

*Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2022*'This is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind' Sunday TimesIf you open that suitcase you'll never close it again.Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life.So begins a captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stoner Saunders decides to unpick her family's past.

A las once de la mañana del 7 de abril de 1926, una mujer salió de la multitud en la Plaza del Campidoglio de Roma.A menos de un paso delante de ella, se detenía Benito Mussolini.Al levantar el brazo para hacer el saludo fascista, la mujer levantó la suya y le disparó a quemarropa.Mussolini escapó ileso por muy poco, la bala apenas le había rozado. Animado por todo el mundo, pudo continuar la marcha fascista.Esta es la asombrosa historia jamás contada de Violet Gibson, la mujer que trató de detener el ascenso del fascismo y cambiar el curso de la historia.Violet fue arrestada, etiquetada como "solterona irlandesa con problemas mentales", y enviada a un asilo mental inglés donde murió en 1956. Esta elegante obra de reconstrucción biográfica, a través de una narrativa llena de suspense, conspiración y diplomacia, recupera la notable figura de Gibson de los registros históricos perdidos. Desde su aristocrática juventud en la élite de Dublín, entre bailes de debutantes y presentaciones en la corte, hasta su compromiso con las ideas fundamentales de la época, como el pacifismo, el misticismo o el socialismo.Pero sobre todo, analiza su menospreciado papel en el desarrollo del fascismo y el culto a Mussolini, en una peligrosa y novedosa época en la que todo parecía posible.