Böcker av Juliet Nicolson

How have secrets changed over the generations, and what does that tell us about ourselves, society and secrecy itself? In her groundbreaking new book, bestselling social historian Juliet Nicolson cracks open a subject close to all our hearts. According to a leading American psychotherapist most of us are keeping an average of thirteen secrets at any one time. Secrets can thrill, but they are just as likely to torment; and the deepest ones travel down the generations, wrapped in shame, guilt and dread.The secrets we keep inside reflect the outside world: they open a uniquely revealing window onto the times we live in. The position of women at the heart of family life has often made them society's secret-keepers, so they hold a special key. By looking at women and their secrets over the past three generations, The Book of Revelations unlocks a period of significant transformation - and one of the most fundamental but hidden aspects of being human.Bringing together social history, intimate personal stories, long-buried memories and the healing of sharing, Juliet Nicolson explores the private and public freedoms that have come with the breaking of successive taboos. Things her mother's generation did not dare speak about became for hers the things they must not repress. But in today's polarised culture, are our daughters and granddaughters once again in danger of being curtailed by censure, caution and fear?

** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ** 'Juliet Nicolson is brilliant at recapturing mood, moment and character . These shadows hung over a country paralysed by frozen heating oil, burst pipes and power cuts. And yet underneath the frozen surface, new life was beginning to stir.

In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siecle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from

From critically acclaimed historian Juliet Nicolson, a novel of a King and country torn between private desire and public duty on the eve of the Second World War'Abdication beautifully evokes the troubled thirties, with its high-stakes politics, easy money and social tensions ... This is a wonderful novel' Amanda Foreman'Superb ... a delightful story of a friendship forged by the drama of the Abdication and the approaching war' The Times_________________________After the recent death of George V, England has a new king, Edward VIII. But for all the confident pomp and ceremony of the accession, it is a turbulent time.When nineteen-year-old May Thomas arrives in Liverpool, her first job as secretary and chauffeuse to Sir Philip Blunt introduces her to the upper echelons of British society - and to Julian, a young man of conscience whom, despite all barriers of class, she cannot help but fall for.But hidden truths, unspoken sympathies and covert complicities are everywhere, and the threat of another world war becomes increasingly inevitable...

Peace at last, after Lloyd George declared it had been 'the war to end all wars', would surely bring relief and a renewed sense of optimism? But this assumption turned out to be deeply misplaced as people began to realise that the men they loved were never coming home. The Great Silence is the story of the pause between 1918 and 1920. A two-minute silence to celebrate those who died was underpinned by a more enduring silence born out of national grief. Those who had danced through settled Edwardian times, now faced a changed world. Some struggled to come to terms with the last four years, while others were anxious to move towards a new future.Change came to women, who were given the vote only five years after Emily Davidson had thrown herself on the ground at Ascot race course, to the poor, determined to tolerate their condition no longer, and to those permanently scarred, mentally and physically, by the conflict. The British Monarchy feared for its survival as monarchies around Europe collapsed and Eric Horne, one time butler to the gentry, found himself working in a way he considered unseemly for a servant of his calibre. Whether it was embraced or rejected, change had arrived as the impact of a tragic war was gradually absorbed.With her trademark focus on daily life, Juliet Nicolson evokes what England was like during this fascinating hinge in history.

'As page-turning as a novel' Joanna TrollopeOne summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinskys gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester. But perfection was over-reaching itself. The rumble of thunder from the summer's storms presaged not only the bloody war years ahead: the country was brought to near standstill by industrial strikes, and unrest exposed the chasm between privileged and poor; as if the heat was torturing those imprisoned in society's straitjacket and stifled by the city smog. Children, seeking relief from the scorching sun, drowned in village ponds. What the protagonists could not have known is that they were playing out the backdrop to WWI; in a few years time the world, let alone England, would never be the same again. Through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals; a debutante, a suffragette, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler and the Queen; Juliet Nicolson illuminates a turning point in history. With the gifts of a great storyteller she rekindles a vision of a time when the sun shone but its shadows fell on all.'Juliet Nicolson has taken this 'perfect summer' as the backdrop for an ambitious work of multiple biography, which sets the extravagance of the upper classes against the increasingly desperate lives of the poor' Observer'Evoke[s] the full vivid richness of how it smelt, looked, sounded, tasted and felt to be alive in England during the months of such a summer' Lady