"Sex, surveillance and the most sinister Nazi of them all in wartime Berlin
There is no book in English about the wartime Berlin 'salon' run by Kitty Schmidt under the secret control of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution
Salon Kitty was the most notorious brothel in the decadent Berlin of the Weimar Republic - the city of Cabaret. But after the Nazis took power, it became something more dangerous: a spying centre with every room wired for sound, staffed by women agents specially selected by the SS to coax secrets from their VIP clients. Masterminded by Reinhard Heydrich, the spymaster whom Hitler himself called 'the man with the iron heart', the exclusive establishment turned listening post was patronised by the Nazi leaders themselves, not knowing that hidden ears were listening.
One of the last untold stories of the Second World War, Salon Kitty's sensational true history is now revealed by historians Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Dr Julia Schrammel. After years of painstaking research and investigation, the story they tell sheds new light on Nazi methods of control and coercion, and the way that they used and abused sex for their own perverse purposes."
"A revised edition of the candid, sometimes shocking, biography of Rupert Brooke revealing the very different reality behind the golden-boy façade of an English literary icon
Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915, aged just 27. All England mourned his passing.
But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality. At the height of his promise a disappointment in love triggered a mental and physical collapse that brought his inner complexities to the surface. Letters reveal a man who was bisexual, misogynistic, anti-Semitic – and sometimes alarmingly unstable.
This revised edition of Nigel Jones's admired biography, including an account of a previously unknown affair of Brooke's, reveals a more conflicted and troubled individual than the gilded Adonis of English literary myth.
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Nigel Jones is an author, a former editor at History Today and BBC history magazines, and has been a TV and radio broadcaster. He is the author of several histories and biographies, including 'The War Walk: A Journey along the Western Front', 'Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth' and 'Sir Oswald Mosley'."
"1914 dawned with Britain at peace, albeit troubled by faultlines within and threats without…
Nigel Jones depicts every facet of a year that changed Britain for ever. From gun-running in Ulster, to an attack by suffragettes on a Velasquez painting in the National Gallery; from the opening of London's first nightclub, to the embarking for Belgium of the British Expeditionary Force, he traces the events of a momentous year from its benign domestic beginnings to its descent into the nightmare of European war."
