' While Britain was losing an empire, it was finding itself...' The compelling opening words to this volume, The Fate of the ...

' While Britain was losing an empire, it was finding itself...' The compelling opening words to this volume, The Fate of the ...

The name of Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (1725-1798), in now synonymous with amorous exploits, & there are plenty of these, vividly narrated, in him memoirs. But Casanova was not just an energetic lover. In his time he was diplomat, business man, trainee priest, traveller, prisoner, magician, confidence trickster, gambler, professional entertainer & chalatan. He financed business projects, organised lotteries, wrote opera libretti & dabbled in high politics. Above all he was an autobiographer of enduring brilliance & subtlety who left behind him what is probably the most remarkable confession ever written. Casanova was a Venetian who explored to the full all the possibilities 18th century Venice offered by way of love & profit before being imprisoned, escaping from gaol, & fleeing from the city to begin travels which took him across Europe. In Moscow & London, Berlin & Constantinople, he met the famous men & women of the time
- Catherine the Great, Voltaire, Louis XV, Rousseau
- & recorded his encounters for the memoirs he wrote in retirement at the end of his life. These memoirs are by turns subtle, touching, thrilling, wonderfully comic & quite irresistible. Although the present edition

Includes:: one third of Casanova's enormous (though unfinished) book, it contains all his major adventures & all is greatest affairs of the heart. ' Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18th century Europe. he ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace.'
- V S PRITCHETT




...

When Robert Maxwell is assassinated at sea by an unknown agency, it can only be a matter of time before the dark secret at the heart of the British Establishment is exposed to the light of day.

SAS soldier Neil Slater has left the Army but soon it seems he is to be drawn back into the covert world. Bowing to the inevitable h allows himself to be recruited by the Cadre, a group that applies 'the rules of war' to those who threaten the internal & external security of the State. Slater soon finds himself in a rising body count situation & asking the question: who is the real enemy?

...

Of all the extraordinary individual accounts that have come out of the Second World War & its aftermath, few can compare with that of Eric Pleasants, a member of the 'bastard' British wing of Hitler's SS. In this book
- the first ever autobiography from within the British Free Corps
- Pleasants writes of the bizarre & traumatic years he spent in the regimes of the twentieth century's most notorious dictators.A life-long pacifist, Pleasants was forced to kill in order to survive. From a vagabond life alongside infamous Triple Cross agent Eddie Chapman on occupied Jersey, Pleasants was taken by the Nazis to a series of prison camps in France. The years that followed held a whirlwind of unexpected turns; he lived a life on the run in occupied Paris, was captured & recruited into the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS, found love with a young german woman, witnessed the bombing of Dresden & attempted to hide from Soviet troops along the sewers of Berlin. When the war ended, Pleasants found himself on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. By now a strong man in a travelling circus, he was arrested by the KGB on charges of espionage & sentenced to 25 years slave labour in the notorious camps of Artic Russia. Only with Stalin's death in 1953 was Pleasants finally released from his unique kind of purgatory, after nearly half a lifetime of peripatetic nightmare. Pleasants died in 1998 at the age of 87. HITLER'S BASTARD remains a remarkable monument to his imperishable will to survive.

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