Hugh Thomas Bücher

Dies ist die erste große Darstellung der Eroberung Mexikos seit über 150 Jahren. Hugh Thomas entwirft ein imposantes und farbenprächtiges Gemälde der Begegnung zwischen zwei Kulturen, Denkweisen und Mentalitäten. Er läßt das alte Aztekenreich mit seiner Hauptstadt Tenochtitlán wiedererstehen und schildert in spannender Weise die militärischen Aktionen, die den Untergang des Weltreichs besiegelten. Vor allem jedoch porträtiert er die handelnden Personen mit dem bewährten, klaren Blick des Angelsachen für Charaktere und ihre Eigenheiten - vor allen anderen die beiden Protagonisten Cortés und Montezuma.

My Dad had an extraordinary life. Born in Hungary in 1933, his early childhood was idyllic in many ways, Hungary being an independent nation at that point. He then experienced the Nazi occupation during WW2 which was immediately followed by another even more brutal regime under the Russians. In 1956 he became involved in the Hungarian uprising as a freedom fighter against the might of Russia and became an unintentional hero when he assisted many people to escape Hungary, probably saving many lives in the process, before reaching the safety of England as an almost fatally wounded refugee. The intention of this introduction is to outline how this book came about.

The Earl of Clarendon describes 17th century bullfights; Salvador Dali plays a surrealist joke on a snooty barman at the Ritz; Rubens visits the Alc�zar; Manet is at the Prado; generals and anarchists meet in the Puerta del Sol. Hugh Thomas has chosen these and other vivid snapshots of Madrid's history from diaries, letters, memoirs and novels across five centuries to evoke the city's drama and life.

After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, he describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. "The Slave Trade" is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated. Thomas also movingly describes such accounts as are available from the slaves themselves.

'World Without End' is the conclusion of a magisterial three-volume history of the Spanish Empire by Hugh Thomas, its foremost worldwide authority. It tells the story of life in a conquered territory that stretched from Cuba to Peru, and of the final conquests of the greatest empire that the world had then seen since the fall of Rome 1,000 years before.

Since its first publication, Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War has become established as the definitive one-volume history of a conflict that continues to provoke intense controversy today.What was it that roused left-wing sympathizers from all over the world to fight against Franco between 1936 and 1939? Why did the British and US governments refuse to intervene? And why did the Republican cause collapse so violently? Now revised and updated, Hugh Thomas's classic account presents the most objective and unbiased analysis of a passionate struggle where fascism and democracy, communism and Catholicism were at stake - and which was as much an international war as a Spanish one.

The first of three volumes on the Cold War by historian Hugh Thomas ('The Spanish Civil War' , etc.). The series promises to be exhaustive. Here Thomas surveys the nascent conflict between the two new great powers from the end of the Second World War in September 1945 to the first year of peace: 1946.