Audiobooks by Charlie English

The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War

'Entertaining and vivid… This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment' OBSERVER 'Reads like a thriller' THE SUN The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects. No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature. From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed. Charlie English tells this true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA’s mastermind, who didn’t waver in his belief that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help free the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.

Charlie English (Author), James Parsons (Narrator)

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The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Art and Hitler’s first Mass-Murder Programme

‘A riveting tale, brilliantly told' Philippe Sands The little-known story of Hitler’s war on modern art and the mentally ill. In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world. The Prinzhorn collection, as it was called, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. What the doctor could not have known, however, was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder. Soon after his rise to power, Hitler—a failed artist of the old school—declared war on modern art. The Nazis staged giant ‘Degenerate Art’ shows to ridicule the avant-garde, and seized and destroyed the cream of Germany's modern art collections. This action was mere preparation, however, for the even more sinister campaign Hitler would later wage against so-called 'degenerate' people, and Prinzhorn's artists were caught up in both. Bringing together inspirational art history, genius and madness, and the wanton cruelty of the fanatical 'artist-Führer', this astonishing story lays bare the culture war that paved the way for Hitler's first extermination programme, the psychiatric Holocaust.

Charlie English (Author), Crawford Logan (Narrator)

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The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past

Two tales of a city: The historical race to 'discover' one of the world's most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend. 'A fascinating interweaving of past and present: meticulously researched, powerfully written and riveting.' -Ben Macintyre, author ofRogue HeroesandA Spy Among Friends To Westerners, the name 'Timbuktu' long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold.Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for'discovery' tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city.But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval center of learning, it was home to tens of thousands according to some, hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When al-Qaeda-linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents, a remarkable thing happened: a team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the manuscripts into hiding. Relying on extensive research and firsthand reporting, Charlie English expertly twines these two suspenseful strands into a fraught and fascinating account of one of the planet's extraordinary places, and the myths from which it has become inseparable.

Charlie English (Author), Enn Reitel (Narrator)

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The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures

'An exemplary work of investigative journalism that is also a wonderfully colourful book of history and travel' Observer, Books of the Year 'A piece of postmodern historiography of quite extraordinary sophistication and ingenuity... [written with] exceptional delicacy and restraint' TLS The fabled city of Timbuktu has captured the Western imagination for centuries. The search for this 'African El Dorado' cost the lives of many explorers but Timbuktu is rich beyond its legends. Home to many thousands of ancient manuscripts on poetry, history, religion, law, pharmacology and astronomy, the city has been a centre of learning since medieval times. When jihadists invaded Mali in 2012 threatening destruction to Timbuktu's libraries, a remarkable thing happened. A team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the precious manuscripts into hiding. Based on new research and first-hand reporting, Charlie English expertly tells this story set in one of the world's most fascinating places, and the myths from which it has become inseparable.

Charlie English (Author), Jonathan Keeble (Narrator)

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