Trying to get some typing certifications so I'm happy to transcribe the back cover synopsis -- holy shit, this sounds like a dot-connector, thank you for introducing this.
Also, this is a fabulous run-on sentence festival and a hoot to type, which helps. Word to James Fenimore Cooper.
In 1940, the German Resistance sent Lonsdale Bryans with peace proposals to the British Government, followed by the ill-fated flight of Rudolf Hess who was imprisoned in Wales surrounded by intrigue which enmeshed the author of this book, sent to Wales from Belfast when 16, ostensibly as a student missionary. Robin Bryans tells an amazing story of his consequent life with the rich and famous, some bizarre but not least because many murders and suicides among them had no inquests. In spite of threats about criminal libel from various governments, he reveals events about the Hess circle which the British and American authorities have embargoed until 2017.
He also reveals more than other books so far about his betrayal by the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, who hid behind immunity from prosecution to avoid giving evidence in the High Court. The spy's evidence would have shown why the War Cabinet stopped sponsoring Lonsdale Bryan's peace mission, so costing millions of lives which might otherwise have been saved. Blunt also avoided giving vital evidence about the Bryans family's involvement with Lord Mountbatten and Rudolf Hess, while the author deals with claims that Blunt's visits to the homes of their mutual friend, Louis MacNeice the poet, formed a part of a Belfast pederast mafia that led to the 1970s sex scandal at Kincora Boys Home.
The father of Fascism, poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, took his women lovers to Rome's Palazzo Doria where he was shocked when the young Prince Filippo Doria returned home from Cambridge with his English cousin, Adeline de la Feld, who later made Robin Bryans her literary executor. Known as Filippo and Filippa, the young cousins outraged D'Annunzio by preaching Futurism that ran counter to D'Annunzio's glorification of Ancient Rome. Adeline de la Feld's neice, Bridget Parsons, after refusing to marry Prince George of Kent, caused her own storms when her step-nephew, Lord Snowdon, married Kent's neice, Princess Margaret.
Filippo and Filippa's grandmother, the Duchess of Newcastle, inherited from her father, Henry Hope, the fabulous diamonds that belong to Marie Antoinette and which form a sinister part of this book. These jewels were disputed in the law courts for 140 years and in the 1970s blighted Robin Bryan's life, as though with their famous jinx. Queen Mary knew these jewels from girlhood and liked to visit the Newcastles' former London house where the Surveyor of the King's Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt, lived as Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Blunt's friend James Pope-Hennessy, stayed with Bridget Parsons and Adeline de la Feld while writing the authorised life of Queen Mary. Before being murdered, Pope-Hennessy was earlier assaulted by John Sparrow of All Souls for accusing the right-wing warden of being 'a failure and regarded, not by All Souls only, but by the whole University with contempt and dislike.' Sparrow equated male homosexuality with genius and Robin Bryan's rebuttal of this featured in 30 years of High Court litigation in which only Bryans won damages.
His earlier books of autobiography have recently been paperbacked and The Times said of the first, 'He is on all planes at once, humorous, detailed and objective as a Brueghel village scene; quietly indignant over injustices practised by the toffs; pullzed, exploratory, expectant, as a growing boy .. He writes as one with a true sense of poetry...'
Just wanted to interject one thing: from my limited vantage point, I see the claim that a UK-3rd Reich
peace would have saved millions of lives bizarre -- I see the realistic path from there being a renewed effort on the Russian front and the extermination of many millions more Soviets than even Stalin thought possible.
From there, things would have gotten worse pretty fast.