Product details:
Author: The National Archives
Publisher: Bloomsbury
RRP: Hardback: $40.00
E-book: $25.99
Description:
The book includes letters from: Karl Marx requesting UK citizenship; an anonymous writer purporting to be Jack the Ripper; Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen Belsen; Winston Churchill to President Roosevelt requesting US support against Hitler; Clement Attlee to Harry S. Truman following Hiroshima; the spies Burgess and Maclean; as well as the 'real Charlotte Gray' spy Christine Granville, among others.
Topics covered include: the Monteagle letter that warned about the gunpowder plot; letters from the Wright brothers trying to get the War Office to fund their aeronautical research; a dispatch on the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Christine Keeler's Russian/British love triangle that begat the Profumo affair; US disapproval of British trade with Cuba; a letter reporting on the first day of the trial of Nelson Mandela; and the anonymous letter that framed the Krays.
The book features approximately 80 letters, each with a 600-word essay and a 3,000-word introduction. There are around 140 images in the book: 80 of the letters themselves and a further 60 supplementary images.
