Corgi, £12.99, 527pp £11.69 from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030

The Past is Myself & The Road Ahead, By Christabel Bielenberg

 

Boyd Tonkin Author Biography

Boyd Tonkin

Boyd Tonkin is Literary Editor at The Independent. An award-winning journalist, he was formerly Social Policy Editor of the New Statesman and has broadcast extensively for BBC arts and current affairs programmes. He has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

More articles from this journalist

Friday 17 February 2012

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Enriched by newly-discovered journals, this reissue unites two outstanding memoirs. A niece of Lords Rothermere and Northcliffe, Christabel Burton married the Hamburg lawyer Peter Bielenberg in 1934. Their courtship coincided with the Nazis' rise, and his bride's grasp that "something very nasty indeed" had "come to stay".

The Past is Myself recounts life under the Third Reich – outwardly privileged, inwardly anguished – until Peter's involvement with the 20 July 1944 bomb plot sent him to a camp. He survived: one of the adventures Bielenberg retells so keenly.

The Road Ahead recreates her family's more peaceful post-war blossoming in Ireland. These books remain an irreplaceable witness to our history.

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