Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another....

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature.

Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to rarely seen personal letters and papers, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.

Dickens was one of the first true celebrity authors. Thousands of fans in Britain and America eagerly awaited each new installment of his stories, and flocked to see him on his legendary speaking tours. Not only did he create an incredible cast of characters on the page, but he was also a dazzling mimic and storyteller, and he wrote, stage-managed, and acted in plays for the public. Throughout his life, from his childhood performances to his legendarily powerful reading tours, Dickens was fanatical about the stage.

From Frank Brady, who wrote one of the best-selling books on Bobby Fischer of all time and who was himself a friend of Fischer’s, comes an impressively researched biography that for the first time completely captures the remarkable arc of Bobby Fischer’s life. When Bobby Fischer passed away in January 2008, he left behind a confounding legacy. Everyone knew the basics of his life—he began as a brilliant youngster, then became the pride of American chess, then took a sharp turn, struggling with paranoia and mental illness. But nobody truly understood him.

Born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, Joseph Bonanno found his future amid the whiskey-running, riotous streets of Prohibition America in 1924, when he illegally entered the United States to pursue his dreams. By the age of only 26, Bonanno became a don. He eventually took over the New York underworld, igniting the "Castellammarese War", one of the bloodiest Family battles ever to hit New York City.

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as any of his adventures.

Fifty years of service at the White House in various capacities, including bodyguard to Abraham Lincoln, William H. Crook's memoir brings an astonishing array of personal details of life in the executive mansion. His sensitive observations of Lincoln are especially moving.

Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted 13 years and destroyed Dickens's marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record.

As a young civil servant, Caroline Slocock became the first ever female private secretary to any British Prime Minister and was at Margaret Thatcher's side for the final 18 months of her premiership. A left-wing feminist, Slocock was no natural ally, and yet she became fascinated by the woman behind the Iron Lady façade and by how she dealt with a world dominated by men. As events inexorably led to Margaret Thatcher's downfall, Slocock observed the vulnerabilities and contradictions of the woman considered by many to be the ultimate anti-feminist.

Sherlock Holmes has retired. After a cruel accident during a fruitless chase for Moriarty, Holmes is maimed badly enough that he declares he will no longer solve the crimes of the London streets. But then a letter comes. A letter imploring him to investigate the Opera Populaire's ghost. The specter everyone has heard rumors of, but only one has seen.

The Uncollected Cases of Sherlock Holmes presents eight new stories about Holmes which set the great detective against the background of Victorian England, an era of enormous progress, in science, transport, and medicine but which also witnessed a surge in urban poverty, prostitution and imperial adventurism. Each of the stories in this collection engages with an aspect of this background.

A client forsworn, a threatened town, and a Goliath of unimaginable proportions. Sherlock Holmes has survived a three-year vendetta against him by Moriarty’s remaining henchmen. Wounded and bleeding, with Mycroft’s help, he clandestinely boards an Atlantic steamship. At the close of his great hiatus, Holmes finds sanctuary at Vassar Women’s College. This radical challenge entangles him in the web of a nefarious mystery. Its unraveling involves New York’s most revolutionary residents: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Orlando Pearson, Dr. Watson's successor as the assistant to Sherlock Holmes, was entrusted by the doctor with notes on cases too controversial to publish during Holmes's career. The three complete stories in this volume were withheld respectively due to the threat they posed to national security, the disclosure of a scandal in a foreign Royal family, and the exposure of excessively close links between Government ministers and industry.

Holmes being away for the day, Watson receives an anonymous request for a meeting at Waterloo station. More for interest's sake than any other reason, he attends the railway station and is confronted by a man whom appears in the last vestiges of physical and mental stress. According to Brinton he has but little time before both his imminent death, and worse, his immortal soul will be cast forever into eternal damnation.

It is June, 1897, the eve of the greatest celebration in the history of London - the Diamond Jubilee of Her Royal Highness Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. At 221B Baker Street, happy anticipation of the event is shattered when an alarmed Samuel Clemens bursts in and informs Holmes and Watson that his life is threatened by a bizarre international conspiracy. Holmes, Watson, and Clemens spend the frantic final days before the Jubilee discovering that the conspiracy is much worse than Clemens imagined. The very fate of the Empire is at stake....

Charlotte Anne Walters undertook the task of reading and reviewing one of the original Sherlock Holmes short stories every day until she had completed all 56. The reviews were posted daily on her blog and attracted viewers from all over the world. The reviews are full of humor and Holmesian insight, ending in a score out of 10 for each story. This book contains all 56 blogs plus additional material including reviews of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's four Holmes novels.

Lestrade realized abruptly that he was not alone. He turned to face his assailants. Outnumbered, he braced himself for an unfair fight with no delusions of winning. Light glinted off metal as one of the men drew a blade, and Lestrade realized that he was in for more than just a beating.

You are about to listen to one of the rare stories to come to light involving "Sigerson", the name Sherlock Holmes went by during the years when the world thought he was dead - his Great Hiatus! This story also has the distinction of being the true first sequel to Horace Holly's She. The only heretofore known sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, records events that occurred two decades after She. This new tale, then, is a record of the events that took place between the previously published adventures.

Here are a few essays about puzzlers in and about Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

"Of all the conundrums that have puzzled Sherlockian scholars, few have been thornier than the "vexed question" of Dr. Watson's wives. In these ten stories, listeners will meet the all-but-unknown women who preceded and succeeded Mary Morstan, as well as learning more about poor Mary's fate. Other cases involve Our Heroes with all levels of Victorian society, including prime ministers and prostitutes, aristocrats and generals, amateur sleuths and Scotland Yarders, composers, novelists, and even ghosts.

Nothing that is secret can remain secret forever. But is it possible that some crimes are better left undiscovered? Join Holmes and Watson as they travel from London to storm-wracked Bedfordshire, where the great detective finds himself uncovering the grisly truth concerning a half-century old murder.

The fog, the mystery, the intrigue of 19th Century London, the incomparable team of Holmes and Watson, the brilliant deductions, the twisting plots, and the unimagined solutions—all these elements are accounted for in The Business of Baker Street, a collection of five new Sherlock Holmes stories. Each tribute tale respects the renowned style of Arthur Conan Doyle, and every story lures the listener into the entrancing world of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes' investigations were not always the neat and self-contained stories that were presented for publication. Holmes' cases overlapped one another considerably, often with the next beginning while the current was still in motion. Some moved linearly from start to finish without interruption while others stretched, a piece here and a piece there, across weeks, months, or even years and decades.

Follow Holmes and Watson on their first espionage mission to Imperial Germany as they unmask the plot behind the Kaiser's premature accession. This case initiates a quarter-century of Anglo-German rivalry that will occupy Sherlock Holmes until His Last Bow, when World War I begins.