A chance remark on the stairs at Peter Morris Music in London’s Denmark Street, in October 1963, set off a chain reaction that helped Brian Epstein apply some much- needed leverage on America’s Hollywood based Capitol label.
Although February 1963 marked the Beatles’ breakthrough in Britain, by the closing months of that year they still had not conquered America. Their manager Brian Epstein had been fighting what seemed like a losing battle to persuade Capitol to release the band’s records in America. How did that chance encounter in Denmark Street eventually force Capitol’s hand?
When the Beatles eventually hit the big time in the US in February 1964, both Epstein and Capitol executives obscured the true story about how this had happened. However, corporate and personal archives now reveal the reality and much more besides. The lid is also lifted on the fact that Capitol viewed the British record industry as being 30 years behind the times, and set out to remix UK master tapes and create distinct US albums. While Capitol’s strategy made the Beatles rich beyond their wildest dreams, Epstein is shown as often struggling to balance Capitol’s commercial decisions against the Beatles’ own demands. This account also explores Capitol’s PR efforts to protect the Beatles image as they get caught up in the whirlwind of world-wide success.
In the early hours of Thursday 8 August 1963, sixteen masked men ambushed the Glasgow-Euston mail train at Sears Crossing in Buckinghamshire. Making off with a record haul of £2.6 million, the robbers received approximately £150,000 each (over £2 million in today’s money). While twelve of the robbers were jailed over the next five years, four were never brought to justice. They evaded arrest and 30-year prison sentences, and lived out the rest of their lives in freedom.
In stark contrast to the likes of Ronnie Biggs, Buster Edwards, and Bruce Reynolds, they became neither household names nor tabloid celebrities. A small team of accomplices who helped execute the crime, before and after the fact, also evaded 25-year prison terms for conspiracy to rob, and likewise lived the remainder of their lives in freedom. Now that these mystery figures, who managed to hide in plain sight for six decades, are dead, the truth about them and indeed about the Great Train Robbery itself can at last be told.
MI14 was set up in 1940 by Winston Churchill as a clearing house for intelligence from and about Nazi Germany. In addition to their own networks and operations, MI14 also had the benefit of intelligence from MI5, MI6, MI9 and MI9, along with a host of other intelligence sources.
The Gestapo was one of the main areas of MI14 interest. Established in 1933 as Department 1A of the Prussian State Police, the Gestapo (a contraction of Geheime Staatspolizei) – the state secret police, soon became identified as the Nazis’ leading instrument of repression and synonymous with the brutality and terror of the regime.
Charged with state security, the Gestapo singled out opponents, real or imaginary, within Germany and the occupied territories, brutally suppressing them with torture and execution, and actively seeking to promote the Nazi state’s perverse policies.
In addition to giving a unique insight into the British intelligence network during World War II, this book also reveals that the Gestapo was not as all-powerful as it is often assumed, and was often under-resourced and overstretched, relying to a great extent on the willingness of ‘ordinary Germans’ to provide information on their fellow citizens.
The name Ian Fleming is synonymous with British espionage, both with his work as a naval intelligence officer in the Second World War as well as with his creation of the most famous fictional spy in literary history: James Bond.
The Ian Fleming Miscellany centres on his contradictions and his public and private personality. It examines the person behind the myth and how he managed (unsuccessfully at first) to create a film franchise that has lasted over fifty years. It considers Fleming’s reputation as a writer, the ‘formula method’ he perfected and the formula’s reliance on the recycling of real individuals and events, as well as the occasional use of plagiarism. It accesses a number of recently opened government files that shed light on previously unknown wartime operations, such as the Air Ministry’s top secret ‘Operation Grand Slam’, which was used in Goldfinger.
While we conveniently package the past into decades when talking about the ‘Roaring ‘20s’, ‘the Rock and Roll era’ of the ‘50s or the ‘Swinging ‘60s’, these tend to be labels of convenience rather than of historical accuracy. In reality, the first four years of the 1950s were more akin to the 1940s, with austerity and rationing still facts of every-day life. Likewise, the first three years of the ‘60s were, in terms of fashion, social attitudes and living standards, really part of the 1950s. The year 1963 was to be the seminal year when most of the things we now associate with the ‘Swinging ‘60s’ really began.
Most years are fortunate to experience three or four seminal events during their allotted twelve months: a cursory look through a chronology of 1963 however, shows just how many significant events took place. This year alone saw a huge number of watershed moments in popular culture, national and international politics.
Arranged in a chronological, month-by-month format, 1963: That Was The Year That Was pieces together these happenings, exploring their immediate and long-term effects and implications. A fascinating read for both those who lived through these momentous times, and for those who want to learn more about the start of the swinging ‘60s.
The Great Train Robbery of 1963 is one of the most infamous crimes in British history. The bulk of the money stolen (equivalent to over £40 million today) has never been recovered, and there has not been a single year since 1963 when one aspect of the crime or its participants has not been featured in the media.
Despite the wealth and extent of this coverage, a host of questions have remained unanswered: Who was behind the robbery? Was it an inside job? And who got away with the crime of the century? Fifty years of selective falsehood and fantasy has obscured the reality of the story behind the robbery. The fact that a considerable number of the original investigation and prosecution files on those involved, and alleged to have been involved, were closed, in many cases until 2045, has only served to muddy the waters still further.
Now, through Freedom of Information requests and the exclusive opening of many of these files, a new picture of the crime and its investigation is revealed, that at last provides answers to many of these questions.
The overthrow and execution of Tsar Nicolas II and the Russian Imperial family is a cause celebre of twentieth century history. This re-investigation of the story finally solves one of the greatest murderers of world history.
The Russian Revolution has long been attributed almost solely to the First World War. Without the war, seen as an inevitable cataclysm, many have argued that Nicolas would have survived and a Romanov might still today sit on the Russian throne, albeit a constitutional monarch. However, a growing number of historians not only disagree with this, but have argued that the war was the indirect result of Nicolas ‘s inability to control the course of events in his own sphere of influence.
New forensic evidence and newly discovered British and Russian Secret Service records reveal the truth about the family’s murder, and the proposed British rescue of the Imperial family, led by British Secret Service officer, Major Stephen Alley.
The most famous serial killer in history. A sadistic stalker of seedy Victorian backstreets. A master criminal. The man who got away with murder – over and over again. But while literally hundreds of books have been published, trying to pin Jack’s crimes on an endless list of suspects, no-one has considered the much more likely explanation for Jack getting away with it. He never existed.
This investigation goes in search of the real story of Jack the Ripper – and this story isn’t set in the brothels of the East End but in the boardrooms of Fleet Street. This is a tale of hysteria whipped up by competing tabloid editors and publishers. The central thesis is that Jack the Ripper was the invention of tabloid journalists, and reveals exactly who was responsible.
The key evidence for the existence of the Ripper – a serial killer allegedly responsible for at least five bestial murders – comes in the form of three letters to the Central News Agency, from a man who identified himself as the killer and called himself “Jack”. These letters can now be plausibly traced back to shadowy tabloid journalists – not intent on solving the crime, but on boosting their careers and their paper’s sales. The effect of these poison pen letters, combined with the gruesome crimes was to give the tabloid media its first hate figure and to boost the circulations of ailing newspapers. The media had discovered the power of a national witch-hunt.
David Lloyd George was unique in being a Prime Minister without a party. Having burned his boats with Asquith and the mainstream Liberal Party, he had to create a new party and secure the vast funds necessary for this new political force. He decided to pay for it by raising money from the sale of political honours. At the centre of this system was Arthur Maundy Gregory, a curious and shadowy figure. Gregory set about his task with gusto, selling honours on a vast and unprecedented scale. But who was Gregory? Where had he come from? And what happened to those who purchased those honours, whose descendants are still enjoying the benefits today?
This book, for the first time, provokes a comprehensive biography of the man Scotland Yard described as the ‘most mysterious character the police ever had to deal with’. As well as helping Lloyd George amass a political fund of over £4m and becoming a rich man himself in the process, Gregory used his newfound wealth to found a newspaper, acquire a gentleman’s club in Mayfair and maintain his links with the Secret Service, for whom he had been agent during the First World War.
The first biography of Prince Albert Victor to paint a truly accurate portrait of a key British royal figure who has become a dumping ground for a host of lurid tales from Victorian gay scandals to Jack the Ripper.
He was heir to the British throne but died in 1892 at the age of 28; his younger brother ultimately succeeded him as the conservative, and stodgy George V. Eddy was as popular and charismatic a figure in his own time as Princess Diana a century later. As in her case, his sudden death in 1892 resulted in public demonstrations of grief on a scale rarely seen at the time, and it was even rumoured (as in the case of Diana) that he was murdered to save him besmirching the monarchy.
Now, for the first time, using modern forensic evidence combined with Eddy’s previously unseen records, personal correspondence and photographs, his innocence is proven. Prince Eddy reveals the truth about a key royal figure, a man who would have made a fine king and changed the face of the British monarchy.