Diana Preston

Michael Preston

A biography of the English explorer and naturalist who journeyed three times around the world, sailing more than 200,000 miles in his lifetime.

Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind

Evaluates the relationship between the ancient-world leaders against a backdrop of their time, exploring the facts and mythology surrounding their individual lives and famous love affair as they influenced the rise of the Roman Empire, in an account that also considers Cleopatra's unlikely power in political arenas.

Power, Love, and Politics in the Ancient World

Cleopatra and Antony

An account of the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania offers a portrait of early twentieth-century maritime history and the terrible impact of the disaster on the course of World War I.

An Epic Tragedy

Lusitania

power, love, and politics in the ancient world

The Human Chain Reaction That Led To The Atom Bomb On December 26, 1898, Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium and observed that "radioactivity seems to be an atomic property." A mere 47 years later, "Little Boy"exploded over Hiroshima. Before the Fallout is the epic story of the intervening half century, during which an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world revealed how to destroy it, and an open, international, scientific adventure transmuted overnight into a wartime sprint for the bomb. Weaving together history, science, and biography, Diana Preston chronicles a human chain reaction of scientists and leaders whose discoveries and decisions forever changed our lives. The early decades of the 20th century brought Einstein's relativity theory, Rutherford's discovery of the atomic nucleus, and Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, and scientists of many nations worked together to tease out the secrets of the atom. Only 12 years before Hiroshima, one leading physicist dismissed the idea of harnessing energy from atoms as "moonshine." Then, on the eve of World War II, the power of atomic fission was revealed, alliances were broken, friendships sundered, and science co-opted by world events. Preston interviewed the surviving scientists, and she offers new insight into the fateful wartime meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr, along with a fascinating conclusion examining what might have happened had any number of events occurred differently. She also provides a rare portrait of Hiroshima before the blast. As Hiroshima's 60th anniversary approaches, Before the Fallout compels us to consider the threats and moral dilemmas we face in our still dangerous world.

From Marie Curie to Hiroshima

Before The Fallout

Portrays the dramatic human experience of the Boxer Rebellion from both a Western and Chinese perspective, drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters of those that lived through this pivotal time in the history of China. Reprint.

The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners that Shook the World in the Summer of 1900

The Boxer Rebellion

Nobel Prize-winning poet Tagore called the Taj Mahal 'a teardrop on the cheek of time', the words inspired by the famous monument of flawless symmetry and elegance.It was built to mark the passionate love of a great Moghul emperor for his Empress. Yet the construction of this architectural jewel bankrupted the Moghul dynasty, set brother against brother and son against father in bloody conflict, and pushed the C17th's most powerful empire into religious fundamentalism and decline. Emperor Shah Jahan married Mumtaz Mahal in 1612 in an unusual love match. Jahan involved his wife on all matters of state, and she followed him on all his military campaigns in spite of being almost constantly pregnant. She bore him 14 children, but her sudden death in childbirth caused Jahan inconsolable grief. His only solace was in creating the perfect memorial to his lost love on the banks of the Jumna River at Agra. The mausoleum, made from milk-white marble and studded with a fortune in precious jewels, took 20 years to complete, involved over 20,000 labourers, and incurred catastrophic costs which led to bloody rebellion by the offspring of his own great love match. Shah Jahan spent his final years in captivity, imprisoned by his own son. The Moghul Empire, irrevocably weakened by anarchy, fratricide and savage warfare, was eventually destroyed by the British Empire while the Taj itself lived on, surviving to this day as a monument of unparalleled beauty.

The Story of the Taj Mahal

A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time

Evolution of Charles Darwin

Chronicles the ill-fated attempt by explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions to reach the South Pole in 1912

Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole

A First Rate Tragedy

Portrays the dramatic human experience of the Boxer Rebellion from both a Western and Chinese perspective, drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters of those who lived through this pivotal time in the history of China.

The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900

How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World

Eight Days at Yalta

Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization. Indeed, 9 convicts from the Australian penal colony, led by Mary Bryant, also traveled 3,250 miles across the open ocean and some uncharted seas to land at the same port Bligh had reached only months before. In this meticulously researched dual narrative of survival, acclaimed historian Diana Preston provides the background and context to explain the thrilling open-boat voyages each party survived and the Pacific Island nations each encountered on their journey to safety. Through this deep-dive, readers come to understand the Pacific Islands as they were and as they were perceived, and how these seemingly utopian lands became a place where mutineers, convicts, and eventually the natives themselves, were chained.

The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia

Paradise in Chains

A narrative history of the great monument of Moghul India traces the story of the Taj Mahal, built by emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, examining its creation against the backdrop of the history of the Moghul Empire. 50,000 first printing.

Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire

Taj Mahal

In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought. On April 22, at Ypres, German canisters spewed poison gas at French and Canadian soldiers in their trenches; on May 7, the German submarine U-20, without warning, torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians; and on May 31, a German Zeppelin began the first aerial bombardment of London and its inhabitants. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. Though Germany's attempts to quickly win the war failed, the psychological damage caused by these attacks far outweighed the casualties. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, celebrated historian Diana Preston links them for the first time, revealing the dramatic stories behind each through the eyes of those who were there, whether making the decisions or experiencing their effect. She places the attacks in the context of the centuries-old debate over what constitutes “just war,” and shows how, in their aftermath, the other combatants felt the necessity to develop extreme weapons of their own. In our current time of terror, when weapons of mass destruction-imagined or real-are once again vilified, the story of their birth is of great relevance.

Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare

A Higher Form of Killing

William Dampier, (1651-1715), was an English adventurer and pirate who preyed on ships on the Spanish Main. Poor and ill-educated and determined to make his fortune, he nonetheless had a passion for exploration and scientific research. Dampier was the first to map the winds and currents of the world's oceans; led the first recorded party of Englishmen to set foot on Australia - 80 years before Cook; wrote about Galapagos wildlife 150 years before Darwin, who drew on Dampier's notes in his own work; was the first travel writer: A NEW VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD was instant bestseller when it was published in 1697 - said to have influenced the novels of Swift and Defoe. A man full of contradictions: he who achieved so much 'blew it' later in life, declining into scandal, failure and even farce. A unique man ahead of his time, he lived a large part of his life among pirates yet managed to preserve what Coleridge called his "exquisite refinement of mind". A classic example of the best narrative history.

The Life Of William Dampier

A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind

An account of the mid-19th-century war in Afghanistan documents how the British government sought to protect regional interests by attempting to install a puppet ruler only to be defeated by united Afghanistan tribes, in a volume that profiles key contributors and discusses how the war set the stage for subsequent hostilities.

Britain's Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842

The Dark Defile

Spanning fifty years, Before the Fall-Out tells the full story of how an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world produced the knowledge of how to destroy it.And of how a scientific adventure shared openly between nuclear physicists from many different nations transmuted into a secretive wartime race for the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - the atom bomb. As much as on the science, Before the Fall-Out focuses on the 'human chain reaction' - the intertwined lives of the many scientists of many nations whose compulsive curiosity led, however unwittingly, ultimately to Hiroshima. In her page-turning account Diana Preston reveals how individuals responded to events - from Allied scientists debating the morality of deploying the bomb, to Japanese civilians who became its first victims, and to a German chemist working on the Nazi bomb project while concealing a Jewish pianist in his Berlin apartment. Diana Preston draws on fresh material including interviews with the last living scientist to have worked with Marie Curie, the only senior scientist to have walked out on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, and the German scientist who accompanied Werner Heisenberg on his controversial wartime visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. A Manhattan Project scientist said that the only secret of the bomb was that it could be made: once this was known, any nation could replicate it. Before the Fall-Out helps us make better sense of our own, dangerous world and of the threats and moral dilemmas that face our society today.

Before the Fall-Out

On a stiflingly hot day in August, 30 B.C., the thirty-nine-year-old Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, took her own life, rather than be paraded in chains through Rome by her conqueror, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. A few days earlier, her lover of eleven years, Mark Antony, had died in her arms following his own botched suicide attempt. Oceans of mythology have grown up around them, all of which Diana Preston puts to rest in her stirring history of the lives and times of a couple whose names--more than two millennia later--still invoke passion, curiosity, and intrigue. This book sets the romance and tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra's personal lives within the context of their political times. There are many contemporary resonances: the relationship between East and West and the nature of empire, the concealment of personal ambition beneath the watchword of liberty, documents forged, edited or disposed of, special relationships established, constitutional forms and legal niceties invoked when it suited. Indeed their lives and deaths had deep political ramifications, and they offer a revealing perspective on a tipping point in Roman politics and on the consolidation of the Roman Empire. Three hundred years would pass before the east would, with the rise of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, once again take a share of political power in the Mediterranean. In an intriguing postscript, Preston speculates on what might have happened had Antony and Cleopatra defeated Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.

The True Story of the Ancient World's Greatest Love Affair

Three years after the tragic sinking of the Titanic, another luxury liner went to a watery grave beneath the icy depths of the North Atlantic. The sinking of the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat in a sneak attack off the coast of Ireland, was one of the most pivotal and universally condemned acts of World War I. Diana Preston chronicles the shipboard experiences of three children who were on that fateful voyage. Eleven-year-old Frank Hook, a third-class passenger, was moving to England with his father and older sister. Twelve-year-old Avis Dolphin, a second-class passenger, was being sent to an English boarding school with a chaperone. And five-month-old Audrey Pearl was traveling in luxurious first class with her parents, three siblings, and two nannies. From different walks of life and varied circumstances, these three children shared a common bond-they all survived one of the most disastrous shipwrecks in history. Their stories, taken from firsthand accounts, personal interviews, and historical documents, provide a riveting look at one of the most tragic and significant events of World War I.

Remember the Lusitania

On May 7th, 1915 a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic sank with the loss of 1200 lives. On board were some world-famous figures, including multimillionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. But this wasn't the Titanic and there was no iceberg. The liner was the Lusitania and it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Wilful Murder is the hugely compelling story of the sinking of the Lusitania. The first book to look at the events in their full historical context, it is also the first to place the human dimension at its heart. Using first-hand accounts of the tragedy Diana Preston brings the characters to life, recreating the splendour of the liner as it set sail and the horror of its final moments. Using British, American and German research material she answers many of the unanswered and controversial questions surrounding the Lusitania: why didn't Cunard listen to warnings that the ship would be a target of the Germans? Was the Lusitania sacrificed to bring the Americans into the War? What was really in the Lusitania's hold? Was she armed? Had Cunard's offices been infiltrated by German agents? And did the Kaiser's decision to cease unrestricted U-boat warfare in response to international outrage expressed after the sinking effectively change the outcome of the First World War? Highly readable, meticulously researched, this special centenary edition casts dramatic new light on one of the world's most famous maritime disasters.

Diana Preston

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