John Toland was notorious. A pamphleteer, a polemicist and a prankster of the first order, modern scholarship has struggled to position his writings within the debates of his day. This study is the first to fully recount his remarkable biography, situating his writings within the controversies that sparked and shaped them.
"The book argues that Toland shaped the republican tradition after the Glorious Revolution into a practical and politically viable programme, focused not on destroying the monarchy, but on reforming public religion and the Church of England. The book also examines how Toland used his social intimacy with a wide circle of men and women (ranging from Prince Eugene of Savoy to Robert Harley) to distribute his ideas in private. It also explores the connections between Toland's erudition and print culture, arguing that his intellectual project was aimed at compromising the authority of Christian knowledge as much as the political power of the Church."--Jacket.
"In these pages participants on both sides, from enlisted men to generals and prime ministers to monarchs, vividly recount the battles, sensational events, and behind-the-scenes strategies that shaped the climactic, terrifying year. It's all here - the horrific futility of going over the top into a hail of bullets in no man's land; the enigmatic death of the legendary German ace, the Red Baron; Operation Michael, a punishing German attack in the spring; the Americans' long-awaited arrival in June; the murder of Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family, the growing fear of a communist menace in the east; and the armistice on November 11.
This text is Jones's account of his part in British Scientific Intelligence between 1939 and 1949. It was his responsibility to anticipate German applications of science to warfare, so that their new weapons could be countered before they were used. Much of his work had to do with radio navigation, as in the Battle of the Beams, with radar, as in the Allied Bomber Offensive and in the preparations for D-Day and in the war at sea. He was also in charge of intelligence against the V-1 (flying bomb) and the V-2 (rocket) retaliation weapons and, although the Germans were some distance behind from success, against their nuclear developments.
The result was a series of landmark works such as Infamy; The Rising Sun, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1970 and reflected his ability, with the help of his Japanese wife, to open doors normally closed to Westerners in Japan; In Mortal Combat; The Last 100 Days; and his best-selling biography of Adolf Hitler.
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and bestselling author, a revealing account of the events surrounding the day that the Japanese military launched a sneak attack on U.S. forces stationed in Pearl Harbor. Includes evidence that top U.S. officials knew about the attack but remained silent for political reasons and the conspiracy afterward to hide the facts. Photographs.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Toland’s classic, definitive biography of Adolf Hitler remains the most thorough, readable, accessible, and, as much as possible, objective account of the life of a man whose evil affect on the world in the twentieth century will always be felt. Toland’s research provided one of the final opportunities for a historian to conduct personal interviews with over two hundred individuals intimately associated with Hitler. At a certain distance yet still with access to many of the people who enabled and who opposed the führer and his Third Reich, Toland strove to treat this life as if Hitler lived and died a hundred years before instead of within his own memory. From childhood and obscurity to his desperate end, Adolf Hitler emerges , in Toland’s words, "far more complex and contradictory . . . obsessed by his dream of cleansing Europe Jews . . . a hybrid of Prometheus and Lucifer."
John Toland was notorious. A pamphleteer, a polemicist and a prankster of the first order, modern scholarship has struggled to position his writings within the debates of his day. This study is the first to fully recount his remarkable biography, situating his writings within the controversies that sparked and shaped them.