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The building of this library – now almost 7,500-tomes-strong – started on August 10, 2013, at Bookworld, the last bookseller in Puerto Banús, the swanky part of Marbella, Spain. Paul Preston’s standard work on the Spanish Civil War – The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain, published by Harper Press – was…
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In the hectic and fluid days following the armistice of 1918 and the birth of the Weimar Republic, assorted groups tried to fill the political vacuum left after the collapse of the Reich and the departure, to exile in neighboring Holland, of the Kaiser. Rivaling paramilitary groups, mostly comprised of veterans returning home from the…
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A delightful little book, Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands allows the armchair traveller to vista exotic faraway locales and dream unperturbed of white sandy beaches and palm trees softly swaying in a cool wind whilst overlooking the surrounding seas. Mrs Schalansky and the ‘fifty islands I have not visited and never will’ ranges…
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The brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright thought that their invention would never be used in war. The dropping of bombs from the sky, they considered, would result in such inhumane suffering that no military commander would countenance such an act of barbarity. They, of course, couldn’t have been more wrong. In the Great War, aeroplanes…
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July 26, 2024 Any book by or about Joseph Conrad enjoys a privileged position in my library. This one was bought on November 21, 2017, from a third party bookseller on Amazon for €19.21. A veritable steal for the thrilling read it offers. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Harvard historian…