Duff Cooper

"Duff Cooper s classic biography charts the remarkable progress of Talleyrand; a silver-tongued master diplomat, infamous turncoat, peacekeeper and libertine. Talleyrand held high office in five successive regimes from France's Ancient Regime, into the Revolution of 1789, Robespierre's Terror, Napoleon's epic wars, and on through restored kings to more revolution. Duff Cooper brings Talleyrand vividly to life and paints an exhilarating picture of this tumultuous period in European history"

Talleyrand

Unique in his own age and a phenomenon in any, Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand, was a statesman of outstanding ability and extraordinary contradictions. He was a world-class rogue who held high office in five successive regimes. A well-known opportunist and a notorious bribe taker, Talleyrand's gifts to France arguably outvalued the vast personal fortune he amassed in her service. Once a supporter of the Revolution, after the fall of the monarchy, he fled to England and then to the United States. Talleyrand returned to France two years later and served under Napoleon, and represented France at the Congress of Vienna. Duff Cooper's classic biography contains all the vigor, elegance, and intellect of its remarkable subject.

A perfectly told tale of defeat and glory—and a paean to gallantry in the face of the absurd—inspired by a real-life secret mission during World War II. Orphaned in the first months of World War One, when his father is killed in action, Willie Maryington dreams only of joining the same cavalry regiment and going to the front. The Armistice dashes seventeen-year-old Willie’s plans, but not his dreams of glory, and he makes the regiment the center of his adult existence. Yet, as the years go by, Willie falls increasingly out of step, not only with civilian life, but with the modern military, where horse charges are a thing of the past, and where a gulf yawns between those who saw action and those who did not. When hostilities break out again between Germany and England, Willie has become a relic. No one could guess that he will be chosen for a mission whose outcome might well decide the course of the Second World War. Inspired by a real-life triumph of British counterintelligence (codenamed “Operation Mincemeat”), and based on classified sources, Operation Heartbreak was suppressed by the British government until 1950. A work of “jewel-like brevity and intensity” (New York Herald Tribune), it is a study in nostalgia and bewildered idealism to place beside the novels of Joseph Roth and Ford Madox Ford.

Operation Heartbreak

First published in 1950, Operation Heartbreak tells the fictional story of Wilie Marygton, a career soldier who was too young for WWI and too old for WWII. Born into a military family, Willie’s one goal in life is to take part in a battle, so he is exhilarated when he receives his commission, and is scheduled to leave for the Western Front on November 9, 1918. However, news of the Armistice changes his orders, and he instead spends the next 20 years in various posts in India and Africa, where his main occupation seems to be big game hunting and polo. With the rise of fascism, he is ready to resign his commission to fight in Spain, but is persuaded otherwise and spends WWII training recruits, lamenting his military status. But in an ironic twist of fate, he does end up playing an important part in the war effort....

Max Arthur

Politician, poet and diplomat, Lord Norwich - better known as Duff Cooper - compiled his autobiography with the aid of his detailed and frank diaries. The many entries he quotes in these pages lend immediacy and humour to some of the most important events for twentieth-century Britain. During his twenty years in the House of Commons, Cooper held the offices of Financial Secretary to the War Office and Treasury, Secretary of State for War, First Lord of the Admiralty (famously resigning in protest at Chamberlain's disastrous Munich Agreement with Hitler, and only returning to government after Churchill became Prime Minister), Minister of Information, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and was the British Ambassador in Paris between 1944 and 1947. Old Men Forget was first published in 1953, the year before his death.

Duff Cooper

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