Iris Origo – författare

The bestselling diaries of WWII in Tuscany, with a new introduction by writer and social historian Virginia Nicholson, and stunning rediscovered photographs

At the height of the Second World War, Italy was being torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the eventual Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman - born in England, married to an Italian - kept a record of daily life in a country at war. Iris Origo's compellingly powerful diary, War in Val d'Orcia, is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground.

At great personal risk, the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans, deserters and refugees. They took in evacuees, and as the front drew closer they faced the knowledge that the lives of thirty-two small children depended on them. Origo writes with sensitivity and generosity, and a story emerges of human acts of heroism and compassion, and the devastation that war can bring.

The last - and arguably most intense - love affair of one of the greatest British poets

Teresa Guiccioli was just nineteen, and recently married to a jealous husband nearly three times her age, when she met Byron. He was one of the most infamous men in Europe; she was an inexperienced but beautiful provincial noblewoman. For the next four years, until Byron went to Greece, this formed the basis of a passionate, scandalous, and very intense love affair.

Iris Origo, bestselling biographer and author of War in Val d'Orcia, was the first to have access to over a hundred love letters and family papers from the time of this affair. She uses these to illustrate the moving story, told with authority and clarity, of Byron and Teresa's turbulent romance.