Patrick Marnham

Chronicles the life of Mexican artist Diego Rivera and discusses the artists who influenced him, his involvement in Communism, his family life, and other related topics.

A Life of Diego Rivera

Dreaming with His Eyes Open

Diego Rivera

A biography of one of the great muralists of the 20th century, which brings the art, the politics and the complexity of Rivera into focus. The book demonstrates that just as Rivera mythologized himself, the artist also endowed the Mexican people with a national myth, melding a troubled revolutionary history and an Indian culture.

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.

A Life of Mary Wesley

Wild Mary

Road to Kathmandu is the part-factual, part-fictional account of Patrick Marnham's own pilgrimage from Turkey to Nepal in 1968. He travelled over three thousand miles, passing through Ankara to Ararat, Tehran and Mashad, Herat, Kandahar and Kabul, Peshawar, Lahore and Varanasi ... before finally reaching Kathmandu. His journey is a kaleidoscopic blend of tortuous train journeys and lethal truck drives; wild deserts, mountains and isolated villages. His nights were often spent sleeping by the roadside and his days searching for the next ride. Along the way, he met a colourful and eclectic cast of characters.

Road to Katmandu

A Portrait of Georges Simenon

The Man who Wasn't Maigret

Published here for the first time, this remarkable cache of letters reveals the great love story of Mary Wesley's life. ‘They met by chance in the Palm Court of the Ritz Hotel on the evening of 26 October 1944. By the time she eventually caught the train back to Penzance two days later they had fallen in love and Eric had declared that he was determined to marry her…’ Before her death in 2002, Mary Wesley told her biographer Patrick Marnham: ‘after I met Eric I never looked at anyone else again. We lived our ups and downs but life was never boring.’ Eric Siepmann was her second husband and their correspondence – lively, intimate, passionate, frustrated – charted their life together (and apart) with unusual candour and spirit. Marnham suggests that through these letters Mary, who famously blossomed as a novelist in her seventies, a decade after Eric's death, found her voice. Bequeathed to Marnham in two size-5 shoeboxes, this is one of the great surviving post-war correspondences. ‘With you I can become the person I really am – and bearing the grave in mind be buried as such. Dear love consider yourself kissed’ Mary, 30 October 1944 ‘I find you brave and amusing, understanding and beautiful, simple and sophisticated, and I love you. More than that, I mean to get you’ Eric, 5 December 1944

Letters of Mary Wesley and Eric Siepmann 1944-1967

Darling Pol

The First 21 Years

The Private Eye Story

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 Projectâe(tm)s secret test detonation. Here he uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two âe~mad geniusesâe(tm) who confronted the devastating power of twentieth-century science in very different ways. Both men travelled to New Mexico. Oppenheimer was honoured for buiding 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.

Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky

Snake Dance

'Penetrating, fully researched and very well written. It describes this extraordinarily productive literary genius at all stages of his life and adds to an understanding not only of Simenon's art, but the art of the novel itself.' - Muriel Spark in Scotland on Sunday

“Enthralling and intelligent, a masterly exploration of the sinister labyrinth that was wartime France . . . It is a remarkable book, utterly fascinating.” —Allan Massie Not long after 2:00 p.m. on June 21, 1943, eight men met in secret at a doctor’ s house in Lyon. They represented the warring factions of the French Resistance and had been summoned by General de Gaulle’s new envoy, a man most of them knew simply as “Max.” Minutes after the last man entered the house, the Gestapo broke in, led by Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon.” The fate awaiting Barbie’s prisoners was torture, deportation, and death. “Max” was tortured sadistically but never broke: he took his many secrets to his grave. In that moment, the legend of Jean Moulin was born. Who betrayed Jean Moulin? And who was this enigmatic hero, a man as skilled in deception as he was in acts of heroism? After the war, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon—France’s highest honor—where his memory is revered alongside that of Voltaire and Victor Hugo. But Moulin’s story is full of unanswered questions: the truth of his life is far more complicated than the legend conveniently manufactured by de Gaulle. Resistance and Betrayal tells for the first time in English the epic story of France’s greatest war hero, a Schindler-like character of ambiguous motivation. A winner of the Marsh Prize for biography, praised by Graham Greene and Julian Barnes, Patrick Marnham is a brilliant storyteller with a keen appreciation for the complex maze of moral compromises navigated in times of war. Told with the drama and suspense of the best espionage fiction, Resistance and Betrayal brings to life the dark and duplicitous world of the French Resistance and offers a startling conclusion to one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Second World War. NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.

The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance

Resistance and Betrayal

Who was the enigmatic Jean Moulin, a man as skilled in deception as he was in acts of heroism? The memory of this French Resistance hero, who was betrayed to the Gestapo and tortured by Klaus Barbie, the infamous 'Butcher of Lyon', is revered alongside that of other national icons. But Moulin's story is full of unanswered questions and the truth of his life is far more complicated than the legend. Patrick Marnham, winner of the Marsh Prize for biography, thrillingly tells the epic story of France's greatest war hero, bringing to light the shadowy and often deceitful world of the French Resistance, and offers a shocking conclusion to one of the great unsolved mysteries of World War II.

The Life and Death of Jean Moulin, Legend of the French Resistance

Army of the Night

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

A Journey to Central America

So Far from God

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 buiding 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.

Investigates the evidence in the murder of the Lucans' nanny, which Lady Lucan accused her estranged husband, the seventh Earl of Lucan, of committing, and the fruitless search among Britain's upper class for Lord Lucan

In the Steps of Lord Lucan

Trail of Havoc

Mary Wesley published her first novel at seventy and went on to write a further nine bestsellers, including the legendary The Camomile Lawn, in a style best described as arsenic without the old lace. Many of her stories were inspired by her experiences during the Blitz, and by her marriages: the first to an aristocrat, a brief and conventional affair, and the second to a penniless writer she adored. A remarkable book about a remarkable woman, Patrick Marnham's brilliantly researched and wonderfully impartial book disentangles truth from rumour, highlighting the links between Wesley's real life and her fiction.

Wild Mary: The Life Of Mary Wesley

Gemma Rovira Ortega

Spanning his entire life, this impressive biography of Mexican artist Diego Rivera looks at his many influences & shows their impact on his work. It includes many color reproductions of his paintings.

una vida de Diego Rivera

Soñar con los ojos abiertos

In 1962 the young Patrick Marnham set off by car for a small village in central France. There he was taught French by an imperious countess, who he later discovered had fought in the Resistance until, betrayed, she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. On the very same day that his hostess’s network was broken, Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s delegate as head of the combined Resistance forces, was arrested in Lyons, where he was tortured by Klaus Barbie before dying in Gestapo custody. Was this coincidence, or were these events connected? The anonymous letter writer suggested a key to the mystery. Using a knowledge of France gained from 12 years as the Independent’s Paris correspondent, and subsequent research in archives in England and France, Marnham set out to discover the truth about the betrayal of the old lady who had become his tutor and friend. Following a trail leading from London through Occupied Europe to the rank and file Resistance in lost corners of France, he has unravelled the story of a complex wartime deception, involving British, American and French intelligence services. The War in the Shadows shines a light on the brutality and cynicism of the Secret War and reveals how it was actually fought. The result is a story of ruthless double-dealing worthy of John le Carré, but with this difference: it is not a fiction.

Resistance, Deception and Betrayal in Occupied France

War in the Shadows

A portrayal of the troubled countries of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, as the author travels through them by train and bus. The author shows daily lives lived against a backdrop of continued and seemingly endless political friction and conflicts, in places that exhibit the contradictions inherent in an area of which Porfirio Diaz said: "Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States". It is an observation that serves as an epigraph to the book, as a means of showing how fervent Catholicism can live side by side with extreme violence, how people can show alternating friendliness and suspicion towards strangers, and how the attitudes with which Central America and the United States regard one another can be a mixture of both fear and longing.

Patrick Marnham

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