Terrorist attack – The Bell Bookshop

Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber

Emma — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

‘Fascinating . . . O’Driscoll’s research is impressive’ Ben Macintyre, The Times

‘It would be hard to overstate how good this book is . . . a fantastic read’ Sunday Independent

‘Superb . . . an even-handed and thrilling gallop through [Dugdale’s] improbable life’ Daily Telegraph

The astonishing story of the English heiress who devoted her life to the IRA

She grew up in a Chelsea townhouse and on a Devon estate.

She was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a debutante in 1958.

She trained at Oxford as an academic economist and had a love affair with a female professor (who was on the rebound from Iris Murdoch).

At thirty, she commenced giving her inheritance away to the poor.

In 1972, the deadliest year of the Northern Irish Troubles, she travelled to Ireland and joined the IRA.

Sean O’Driscoll’s Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber tells the astonishing story of Rose Dugdale, who went on to become a committed terrorist, participating in a major art heist and a bombing raid on a police and army barracks; who kept a pregnancy secret for nine months in prison and gave birth there; and who ended up at the heart of the IRA’s bomb-making operation during its deadly final spasms in the 1990s. Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber is both the page-turning biography of a remarkable woman and a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of a terrorist organization.
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‘Possibly the most extraordinary book you’ll read this year’ Irish Examiner

‘Jaw-dropping’ Joe Duffy

‘Generous and well researched’ LRB

Yoga

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was.

January 2015. High on literary success and familial bliss, Emmanuel Carrère embarks on a rigorous ten-day meditative retreat in rural France in search of clarity and material for his next book, which he thinks will be a subtle, upbeat introduction to yoga. But his trip is cut short, and he is brought down to earth with a thud as he returns to a Paris in turmoil in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.

From then on, Carrère’s life begins to unravel, along with his novel-in-progress. He is diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder and is sectioned to a psychiatric hospital for a four-month stint, where he is subject to electroshock therapy. His marriage crumbles, he is struck by grief at the death of a close friend and is haunted by a love affair with a mysterious woman who disappeared from his life. Pushed to the edge of sanity and forced to reckon with his identity as a man and a writer, Carrère sets out on a life of action instead of meditation.

This is a book that embraces the Yin and Yang of life: the pull between life and death, desire and despair, presence and absence, fight and flight. It is a book about a world and a man in tumult, and about how surprisingly far practising meditation – and writing about it – can take us in life. With raw honesty and humour, YOGA gives us the self-portrait of a man struggling to live with himself and others, by one of our greatest and most surprising international writers.

Going Dark

Emma — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Engaging and visceral … Reads like a thriller’ Financial Times‘Riveting and often deeply disturbing … A punch to the stomach’ Sunday Times‘Ebner has done some gutsy, thought-provoking research’ Sunday Telegraph‘Fascinating and important’ SpectatorBy day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside. But two years ago, she began to feel she was only seeing half the picture; she needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. She decided to go undercover in her spare hours – late nights, holidays, weekends – adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum. Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from ‘Trad Wives’ and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist. In Going Dark, Ebner takes the reader on a deeply compulsive journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking, exposing how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them.