bibliotheque

L'exode de mai-juin 1940 est la face la plus visible de la débâcle. Car si les combats, les intrigues politiques et, plus tard, les appels de Pétain et de De Gaulle ne touchent qu'une minorité, le sort des huit millions de Français fuyant l'avancée allemande...

En juillet 1953, au moment de l'annonce officielle de la chute de Lavrenti Beria, alors le tout puissant ministre de l'Intérieur de l'URSS, certains observateurs occidentaux sentirent qu'il y avait un "mystère Beria". Mais nul ne se douta à l'époque des...

La connaissance de l’univers du Goulag peut désormais prendre appui sur le document unique que constitue un album original comprenant la reproduction de dessins effectués de 1949 à 1989 par l’ancien milicien et gardien de prison Dantsig Baldaev, album...

Prince des ténèbres ? A maints égards, Richard Nixon est entré dans l'Histoire comme une figure maléfique. Seul président américain à avoir jamais été contraint à la démission, son nom reste attaché au scandale du Watergate. Mais sur toute son oeuvre...

Margherita Sarfatti first met Benito Mussolini in 1911 at the socialist daily Avanti! In what became a turbulent love affair she emerged as an important writer, art critic, and major adviser to the founder of the Fascist party. Even though she converted...

Fifty years ago on November 22, 1963, in Dallas's Dealey Plaza, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline. LIFE magazine, the weekly pictorial chronicle...

John F. Kennedy died almost half a century ago—yet because of his extraordinary promise and untimely death, his star still resonates strongly. On the anniversary of his assassination, celebrated political scientist and analyst Larry J. Sabato—himself...

A longtime congressional correspondent for Market News International assesses the unique senatorial career of John F. Kennedy. JFK’s eight-year Senate tenure coincided exactly with the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency and roughly with Lyndon...

Elle a mobilisé huit millions de soldats sur le front, mais la Grande Guerre a bouleversé l'existence de tous les Français. Et les plus belles lettres de Paroles de poilus (Librio numéro 245) ne peuvent se lire sans les mots, en regard, de leurs familles,...

Despite being President for only 1,036 days, John F. Kennedy remains arguably the most popular leader in American history. His presidency witnessed the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the development of counterinsurgency in the Vietnam...

Pétain, promu maréchal de France en novembre 1918 est auréolé d’un immense prestige au lendemain de la guerre. Vingt ans plus tard le 17 juin 1940, alors à la présidence du Conseil il annonce dans un célèbre discours prononcé à la radio française la capitulation...

Qui de plus français que le couturier et mécène Pierre Cardin ou le premier vainqueur du Tour de France cycliste, Maurice Garin ? Sauf que l'un et l'autre sont nés Italiens. A l'inverse, combien de Français savent que le prix Nobel de littérature de l'an...

“With the prescience that all truly great biographers possess, Berg discovered in Woodrow Wilson a figure who would understand Washington’s current state of affairs.”—Vanity Fair From Pulitzer Prize winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author A. Scott...

Wendy Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving that we have ignored the reality of women’s participation in the Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held...

An account of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1882–1945) first few years in politics. FDR began his career in the shadow of Theodore Roosevelt, America’s most famous politician. By TR’s death in 1919, FDR was a fairly prominent national figure and the 1920 Democratic...

In a chronological, episodic narrative that grows somewhat tedious yet chilling, Minutaglio (City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle, 2004, etc.) and Davis (J. Frank Dobie, 2009, etc.) unearth the various...

En 1910, alors que les crimes des "apaches" hantent les esprits et que Clémenceau vient de créer les "brigades du Tigre", Edmond Locard, l’un des pères de la criminalistique, fonde, à Lyon, le premier laboratoire de police scientifique au monde. Les casse-tête...

When Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess set off for Britain on a peace mission in May 1941, he launched one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. Had he really acted alone, without Hitler's knowledge? Who were the British he had come to see? Was British...

An intensely focused, heavily statistical study of the widespread denunciation of Jewish refugees among Polish gentiles during the Nazi occupation. The salvation of the Jews who managed to escape the ghettos and the death trains was largely left in the...

John Buckley offers a radical reappraisal of Great Britain's fighting forces during World War Two, challenging the common belief that the British Army was no match for the forces of Hitler's Germany. Following Britain's military commanders and troops...

From her first appearances on the stage and screen, Maureen O'Hara (b. 1920) commanded attention with her striking beauty, radiant red hair, and impassioned portrayals of spirited heroines. Whether she was being rescued from the gallows by Charles Laughton...

A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today’s world. During the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, two immensely powerful brothers led the United States into...

Durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la résistance au nazisme en France fut l'oeuvre d'hommes et de femmes de toutes origines sociales, politiques et nationales. Parmi ceux-ci, les étrangers ont occupé une place décisive. Venus en France pour des raisons...

Alongside Waterloo and Gettysburg, the Battle of Verdun during the First World War stands as one of history’s greatest clashes. Yet it is also one of the most complex and misunderstood, in a war only imperfectly grasped. Conventional wisdom holds that...

Le président le plus photogénique du siècle s'est offert la belle postérité des hommes frappés en pleine gloire. Sa beauté ne subira pas l'outrage du temps" Marc Dugain. Un des créateurs de cette image fut Jacques Lowe qui rencontra John Fitzgerald Kennedy...

De 1933 à 1944, lors de causeries radiophoniques, le président Franklin Delano Roosevelt explique et justifie son action auprès du peuple américain. Au cours de ces années du New Deal, puis de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, où l'influence des médias bouleverse...

Charles Maurras. Un nom qui sent le soufre et dont l'évocation suscite les murmures désapprobateurs. Maurrassien. L'adjectif a fini par englober la droite nationaliste, xénophobe et anti-républicaine. Monarchiste, fer de lance de l'antidreyfusisme et...

Dallas, le 22 novembre 1963. John Fitzgerald Kennedy est abattu à 12h30, devant des millions de téléspectateurs. Le polar du siècle vient de commencer, avec ses politiciens douteux, ses truands cyniques, ses flics fiévreux, ses millionnaires pleins de...

Does the world need another book on that dismal year? Absolutely, if it’s by Hastings (Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945, 2011, etc.). After many accounts of World War II, the veteran military historian tries his hand, with splendid results. Most readers...

“Ellis paints a portrait of a politician who, like many other politicians, often publicly sailed with the prevailing political winds of the day but who, in private, constantly exhibited a fundamental commitment to fairness and justice. Freedom’s Pragmatist...

A prescient World War II diary by a German judge who loathed the Nazi regime yet was a military judge during the war. Taken up the day after his 59th birthday, on March 28, 1944, until the end of the war, and infused with his raging against the duplicity...

In 1967, a Baltimore man named Howard Donahue began investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Like countless Americans, Donahue was fascinated by the events in Dallas. But what separated him from other amateur sleuths, and even the...

A chronicle of the friendship between writer Albert Camus and biologist Jacques Monod, skillfully combining science, biography and history. They first came together in September 1948 to cooperate in a venture against international communism known as Groupes...

How a Danish national “we” kept the Nazis at bay—and largely saved its Jewish population. In this passionately argued study, former Politiken editor in chief Lidegaard (Defiant Diplomacy, 2003, etc.) takes on the complicated creation of the “model protectorate”...

Jusqu'où le Front national ira-t-il ? Rarement le parti de Marine Le Pen n'a semblé si près de la dédiabolisation qu'il s'était assignée; jamais il n'est apparu aussi proche du pouvoir. Beaucoup s'en alarment, mais cette dédiabolisation n'a rien d'une...

Premier biographe à puiser dans un matériau nouveau - les carnets de Joseph Goebbels, publiés en 2006 -, Peter Longerich pénètre dans le cercle intime du pouvoir. Il démêle les relations complexes qui unissaient Goebbels, sa femme et Hitler dans un triangle...

Après l'armistice du 11 novembre 1918, cinq terribles années de guerres se clôturent enfin, cinq années qui ont vu l'apparition des armes chimiques, la généralisation des bombardements, l'enlisement des armées. Et qui ont fait dix millions de morts......

During the twelve years of Hitler’s Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing his tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on...

A well-organized, fast-moving political narrative situating the absolute breakdown of Germany's currency in 1923 in the double context of the international drive for World War I reparations and the violent effects of internal political extremism. Royal...

Adolf Eichmann was among the Gestapo war criminals who managed to escape from Europe and establish new lives in Argentina. The search for him involved an international group of Nazi hunters who left no stone unturned to determine where and how he had...