The authorized, and astonishing, biography of Mary Wesley. Descended from the Duke of Wellington, Mary Wesley grew up a rebel, believing that she was her mother’s least favourite child. Like many girls of her background, she married for escape, although her first marriage (to Lord Swinfen) was conventional. Her second husband, Eric Siepmann, a writer who never managed to make any money at all, was feckless and bohemian. In between Swinfen and Siepmann, she had a love affair with Czech war hero, Heinz Ziegler — and possibly with his brother at the same time; and in her later years enjoyed a torrid relationship with screenwriter Robert Bolt. At the outbreak of the Second World War she was, as she put it, “roped into intelligence,” where she worked on breaking codes. Her experiences in MI5, and her many wartime love affairs, which form the core of this biography, also formed the cores of her novels. She wrote about the atmosphere of the home front and how war dislocates families, and how a sense of the imminence of death loosens the inhibitions. Through hours of interviews with Mary and access to her personal papers, Patrick Marnham discovered her story. It is a story of near-suicide and reckless courage, and tells of how a passionate and headstrong woman turned her back on her privileged position and succeeded in living life on her own uncompromising terms.

Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley

Marnham, Patrick

Biographies & Memoirs

Vintage Books

Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky

In this unique journey across continents and centuries, award-winning author Patrick Marnham explores the ruthless dictators, dangerous minds and prehistoric precedents behind the development of nuclear power.      The terrifying first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare in history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering in the age of mass destruction. Yet it was also the climax of a story that extends beyond Japan and Washington: the culmination of decades of scientific achievement and centuries of colonial exploitation.      Snake Dance is the account of a journey that turned into a quest to discover how humanity reaches this point. Patrick Marnham travels from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the lethally derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa. He follows the shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New Mexico for the Manhattan Project's secret test detonation. Here he uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two 'mad geniuses' who confronted the devastating power of twentieth-century science in very different ways.     Both men travelled to New Mexico. Oppenheimer was honoured for building a bomb, the ancestor of weapons that have enslaved humanity. Warburg, condemned to obscurity and confined to a mental hospital, regained his sanity by studying the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southwest who, for thousands of years, practiced the ritual of the 'snake dance' in an attempt to harness the power of lightening. And it was in New Mexico, at Los Alamos, that the ultimate act of playing God was realised.    The circle is closed in Japan. Faced with the catastrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in March 2011, scientific man, like the snake dancers, is faced with a power beyond his control. Spanning three continents and the history of civilisation, Snake Dance is at once an intrepid intellectual adventure and a wake-up call for mankind.

History

Military

Chronicles the author's journey to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, writing of guerilla movements, Church activities, and journalistic standoffs and evoking lucidly the people and predicaments he encountered

So Far from God: A Journey to Central America

Travel

Central America

Penguin??Books

Fantastic Invasion: Dispatches from Africa

Literature & Fiction

Hardcover octavo, 271 pp. Black cloth w gilt titles.

Fantastic Invasion: Notes on Contemporary Africa

Africa

Harcourt

Winner of the Marsh Prize for biography and an Edgar Award finalist. "I doubt if there will be a better, or a better written, portrait of Simenon for a long time."--Julian Barnes

The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon (A Harvest Book)

Arts & Literature

Mariner Books

Fantastic Invasion: Dispatches from Contemporary Africa

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

Private Eye Story: The First 21 Years

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Wm. Collins Sons & Co.

The Private eye story: The first 21 years

A. Deutsch

Road to Katmandu

Asia

Macmillan

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