Bøker av Angela Lambert

It was called the London Season, and for three centuries it had been a time of fashionable suppers and brilliant balls that introduced England's most aristocratic and eligible girls to society. Though by 1939 the stately gavottes and minuets had long since given way to waltzes and fox-trots, the cream of young womanhood still curtsied low before the Queen and then went out to dance the night away with the young men they would one day marry.But the Season of 1939 was different: it was to be the last. And like many a finale, it lives on in memory as a lovely, enchanted dream, all the more beautiful for the horror and destruction that would follow so soon.Based on a wealth of first-hand reminiscences, press clippings, and memorabilia, 1939: The Last Season of Peace is a fascinating portrait of this fairy tale about to end. Itcaptures the end of an era as it recreates a world whose inhabitants still believed in empire and tradition. It is a vivid picture of a generation suspended in a brief moment of sunlit summer glory, before the gathering storm of World War II swept it all away.

First published in 1992, A Rather English Marriage tells of Roy Southgate and Reginald Conynghame-Jervi, who have nothing in common but their loneliness and their wartime memories.Roy, a retired milkman and Reggie, a former RAF Squadron Leader, are widowed on the same day. To assuage their grief, the vicar arranges for Roy to move in with Reggie as his unpaid manservant. To their surprise, they form a strange alliance, based on obedience, need and the strangeness of single life. Then Reggie meets Liz, a vibrant but near-bankrupt woman of irresistible appeal, while Roy and his son's family grow gradually closer. Marriage, it seems, however far from ideal, can be a great protector against isolation.

'We who are members of the single classes, unmarried and unattached, are always waiting to fall in love...Every day and each encounter holds out the possibility of that momentous flash which will change everything.' Constance Liddell, in her mid-forties, answers a personal column ad - 'Polish gentleman, 50s, political refugee, seeks intellectual woman for marriage' - and arranges to meet Iwo Zaluski. For Constance, her work, children, friends and friendship with her charming, philandering ex-husband only sometimes alleviate the deeper longing for intimacy and marriage. Meeting Iwo Zaluski for the first time, on a walk on Hampstead Heath, she perceives in him the loneliness of a fellow exile. Too rapidly, she falls in love.

Long light evenings, swimming and tennis, striped cotton frocks...it's summer term at Raeburn. New arrival Constance King hates her boarding school on sight, yet dreams of being accepted by the other girls. Instead, she finds a ferment of frustrated hopes mingled with excited expectations...

How did a 19 year-old, middle-class, Catholic girl from Munich become Hitler's mistress and what kept him faithful until the end of their lives? There are more than 700 biographies of Hitler, yet this is the first thorough study of Eva Braun, his secret mistress.