english history

What happens when "a Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer and a deeply eccentric Spaniard" come together to work for MI5?  Only one of the most important deceptions in modern history.  Ben Macintyre's latest book chronicles the machinery of the pivotal Operation Fortitude, a massive undertaking in misinformation and misdirection that led the Germans to believe that the Pas de Calais, not Normandy, would be the beachhead from where the Allies would launch their European invasion.  Macintyre documents the circuitous and often borderline

I was so excited to see this book!  Sister Queens is a carefully researched, dual biography of two of Isabella and Ferdinand’s daughters - Katherine became a queen by marrying the heir to the English throne, later crowned Henry VIII, after the death of her 1st husband, Henry’s brother, Prince Arthur.  Juana became Queen of Spain by inheriting that crown from her mother, Isabella.  What correspondence lay hidden in archives in Spain and England?  What might these two Sister Queens have shared?   What comforts did they give each other as their lives began to go “off script”?

Isabella and