Frances Stonor Saunders

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.

The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

The Cultural Cold War

During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, their freedom was often denied, while in the West freedom came at a cost. This book describes the CIA influence on cultural life during the Cold War.

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War

Who Paid the Piper?

من الذي دفع للزمّار؟

"La historia no contada asombrosa de una mujer que trató de detener el ascenso del fascismo y cambiar el curso de la historia",--Amazon.com Spanish translation.

La mujer que disparó a Mussolini

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 Woman Who Shot Mussolini

Combed tirelessly through original documents to produce a history seemingly as immediate and relevant as events of yesterday."--Jacket.

Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth-Century Italy

The Devil's Broker

This volume, the most comprehensive account yet of the CIA's activities between 1947 & 1967, presents shocking evidence of the CIA's manipulative cultural undertakings during the Cold War. This impressively detailed book draws together newly declassified documents & exclusive interviews to expose the CIA's astonishing campaign wherein some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom -- including George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., & Gloria Steinem -- become instruments of the American government. A true story of intrigue & betrayal. B&W photos. A real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period.Ó

La guerra fredda culturale. La Cia e il mondo delle lettere e delle arti

«Una grande opera di indagine storica». Edward W. Said «Saunders ha ragione. Questo è un libro cruciale sui pericoli, i compromessi e le manipolazioni di un'epoca intera - e molto recente». «The Times» «Un contributo di enorme importanza alla comprensione della storia del secondo dopoguerra». «The Wall Street Journal» «Immensamente documentata, la storia culturale della Stonor è scritta in maniera divertente, persino spiritosa». «The New York Times Book Review» «Il resoconto più completo dell'attività della CIA fra il 1947 e il 1967». «The New York Times»

La guerra fredda culturale

Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. 'If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again,' warned her mother. 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. Now she finds herself with the dilemma of two competing urges: wanting to know what's in the suitcase, and wanting not to know. So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unpicks her father's and his family's past. Is it possible to bring her father back, to summon once more someone who was distant and elusive when alive? The past is always the history of loss, of black holes, of things gone missing. Life is a long forgetting, even as we live it. The Suitcase is an extraordinary, heroic effort of retrieval, driven by the ache for completion. It is about the silences and stories that protect us, and the borders we construct, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are.

Six Attempts to Cross a Border

The Suitcase

The second son of a minor Essex landowner, John Hawkwood chose to head south in 1360 after serving as a captain in the Black Prince's wars against France. He and other freebooters besieged the Pope at Avignon, and when they were paid to go to Italy, discovered that the threat of force could be very profitable indeed. The Italian city states - Florence, Milan, Siena and Pisa - offered the richest pickings in Europe. Hawkwood became the most successful, clever and reliable mercenary leader of the time, leading the Italians to conclude that 'the Devil is an Englishman'. This is the story of an age when everything came to have a price - when the mercenary companies were vastly rich corporations, with their own accountants, lawyers and orators. But Frances Stonor Saunder's book is also a glittering and hard-edged evocation of a time of cultural greatness, peopled by characters ranging from Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccaccio and St Catherine of Siena to corrupt Popes and the Visconti tyrants of Milan. Above all, Hawkwood is a brilliant illumination of one of the outstanding figures of English and European history.

Diabolical Englishman

Hawkwood

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.

Frances Stonor Saunders

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