In an age of history-writing seemingly chock full of reassessments, regurgitations and 're-imaginings', it is satisfying to review a book that is based on a genuinely new archival source. Giles Milton's The Stalin Affair uses as its core the papers of Kathleen Harriman daughter of the flamboyant millionaire Averell Harriman - to give a precious insight into wartime inter-Allied relations.
They tell a fascinating tale.
Kathleen - or Kathy, as she was known - was barely 23 and leading the life of an ordinary socialite, when her father called her to join him in London in the spring of 1941.
Averell Harriman had been sent to the British capital by President Franklin D Roosevelt to smooth Anglo-American relations, as the US slid inexorably towards active participation in the European war.
Harriman dashing, handsome and intellectually acute - would become one of the most significant movers and shakers in the Allied cause: a trusted adviser to Roosevelt, a regular at Chequers, a man for whom every diplomatic and political door, it seemed, was open. This was the world into which he brought Kathy - a "lively brunette with a forthright manner" - in the hope that it would be the making of her. She would spend the next four years as an observer at the very top table of Allied diplomacy.
Throughout that period, she would be no mere passenger. Despite her tender years, she worked first as a journalist, and when she wasn't weekending with the Churchills or dining with Lord Beaverbrook, she was touring Britain's bombed-out suburbs writing copy for British dailies or American weeklies. In time, she accompanied her father to Moscow - where he was appointed US ambassador and where she would serve as his unofficial aide and assistant, participating both in the social whirl and the political maelstrom that ensued.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 2024-Ausgabe von BBC History UK.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 2024-Ausgabe von BBC History UK.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
Viking mussels
ELEANOR BARNETT digs into archaeological research to recreate a Viking-cum-AngloSaxon seafood dish from medieval York
Fingers, frog's and fairies
Fortune telling was all the rage in the 16th and 17th centuries, and practitioners would stop at nothing to tap in to the supernatural. Martha McGill tells a story of Highland seers, tarot cards and encounters with the spirit world
Nothing matches being with Alexander the Great on foot in the Hindu Kush
AT OUR LITTLE FILM COMPANY, MAYA VISION, we recently took the decision to digitise all of the rushes of our key films so that we could dispose of hundreds of boxes of tapes that had been kept in storage, throwing out stuff we thought we would never need again.
Library of the dead
Highgate Cemetery, created as a fashionable resting place for wealthy Victorian dead, is a veritable who's who of London's great and good. PETER ROSS roams the avenues of this most atmospheric necropolis
Slavery, exploitation and racism. These tragedies have long dominated histories of Africa. But there's another way to tell this story. And it's one that puts Africans right at the centre of their continent's extraordinarily rich and vibrant past
An 1414, in the Chinese city of Nanjing, a giraffe caused a stir. Amid a crowd of shocked, noble spectators, an official, leading the creature via a rope tied round its face, presented it to China's Yongle emperor. His officials said it was a qilin - an auspicious unicorn - which his sage governance had made appear.
England's forgotten hero
When the Hundred Years' War was reaching a climax, one man was fighting tenaciously to secure the English claim to the French crown. So why, asks Joanna Arman, is Henry V's formidable brother, John, Duke of Bedford, not better known?
HENRY III AND THE MAGNA CARTA THAT MATTERED
King John's sealing of a charter at Runnymede in 1215 is one of the most feted moments of the Middle Ages. Yet, writes David Carpenter, it was the charter issued by his son 10 years later that became fundamental to England's history
Gutenberg publishes a pioneering new book
‘The printing press triggers an information revolution
How empire ruptured rural Britain
We know that enslaved Africans and their descendants suffered in the distant colonies of empire. But, as Corinne Fowler explains, the colonial system also had dire impacts on people in the countryside of the 'motherland'
"I FELT VERY ALONE IN A WORLD GONE HORRIBLY MAD"
It was a moment of possibilities, dislocation and dread. Dan Todman tells the story of the 1.5 million urban Britons evacuated to the countryside at the start of the Second World War
