Books like A divided life by Robert Cecil

An exhaustive account of the discovery, design, and deployment of the atomic bomb, tracing its rapid development from early nuclear science to the Manhattan Project and the first bombings of Japan.

Inside the Cold War era, Ben Macintyre reveals the shocking double life of Kim Philby, MI6’s chief counter‑intelligence officer who betrayed his friend, Nicholas Elliott, and the West to Moscow.

"William Hitchcock's sweeping new survey fills a critical gap in the writing on postwar Europe. The Struggle for Europe starts by assessing the impact of World War II on European politics and society and the foundations of Europe's extraordinary economic recovery. It explores the roles of the United States and the Soviet Union in shaping the postwar settlement and shows how Europeans often resisted and defied superpower dictates. In examining Cold War politics between 1945 and 1989, Hitchcock reveals the serious challenges mounted to the super-powers by such European leaders as Charles de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, and Margaret Thatcher. The book examines the fall of Communism as an ideology and lays out the long-term factors that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Concluding chapters show that Europe has made great strides in fulfilling the promise of economic and political union but has yet to overcome the troubling legacy of racial, ethnic, and national antagonism."--BOOK JACKET.

Anthony Blunt, aesthete, communist, homosexual, MI5 agent and Soviet mole, was Surveyor of the King's Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute. Betrayed in 1963, he voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Late that year, she was to expose his treachery and strip him of his knighthood. While the other Cambridge spies (Philby, Burgess and Maclean) subordinated their lives and careers to espionage, Blunt had a separate passionate existence. His reputation as an art historian was second to none: he made an enormous contribution to the establishment of art history as an academic discipline; his volumes on Poussin, French and Italian art and old master drawings are still in print and some are still set texts. At the Courtauld he trained a whole generation of world-class academics and curators. A human paradox, Blunt was a highly-regarded member of the British intelligentsia but his life as such and as a member of the British homosexual subculture of the 30s, 40s and 50s has hardly been explored. Miranda Carter's biography shows how his life vividly illustrates certain key themes and moments of the 20th century. Blunt led two totally discrete lives, he was a set of permanent contradictions.