In our final episode of the year - and the 100th edition of the podcast - Helen Fry returns to share some more remarkable stories from the Second World War. 

Helen tells Phil of a long secret intelligence operation designed to extract information from enemy soldiers, sailors, pilots - and some of Hitler’s most senior Generals. Many of these men knew that the British were skilled at playing physiological tricks on prisoners of war - but they still fell for many of them, generating some hugely important information at critical times.  

You can buy Helen's book - and thousands of others - in our own online bookstore...

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-walls-have-ears-the-greatest-intelligence-operation-of-world-war-ii-helen-fry/77794?aid=12054&ean=9780300254853&

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Writer Laura Thompson returns to the podcast, bringing all the insights and cleverness that has made her one of our most popular guests. And this time her subject is 'the heiress', including some of the most celebrated women in high society and literature. In her book 'Heiresses: the Lives of the Million Dollar Babies', Laura tells an incredible story of social change and bad behaviour in high places.

Although celebrated and pursued, the heiress could also be the target of scheming and manipulative men, and could never be sure if she was being admired and loved for herself or for her family's money. Some flourished, some fell apart and many lived lives of the highest drama.

You can buy Laura's book, and all the books we feature on the podcast here, along with thousands of others in our special Scandal Mongers bookshop...

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/heiresses-the-lives-of-the-million-dollar-babies-laura-thompson/2279252?aid=12054&ean=9781788548229&

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This week Carolyn Harris joins Phil to talk about one of the most extraordinary royal relationships of all time; between the future George IV and his unhappily married wife Caroline of Brunswick.

From a disastrously drunken wedding night, which nevertheless produced a princess, through years of mutual loathing, numerous affairs and illegitimate children (his), rumour of exotic foreign lovers (hers), political intrigues, popular protests and endless satirical cartoons and pamphlets to a final, farcical coronation ceremony in which the Queen of England was locked out of Westminster Abbey by the King’s own guards - this is quite a tale!

We also touch on a much happier royal union that happened just a few years later - that between Victoria and Albert.

Canadian historian Carolyn Harris is a world class expert on all things royal and has made a particular study of consorts - the women, and sometimes men, who marry into royalty and then have to carve out a role for themselves, often in an alien country and culture.

Her books can be found in North America and Canada and some are also available in the UK...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raising-Royalty-Years-Royal-Parenting-ebook/dp/B01CDU0NCE?ref_=ast_author_dp

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Long before she became one of the most famous women in the world - and the love of a man destined to become a King-Emperor - Wallis Simpson had lived an extraordinary life. Perhaps the most incredible part of it was when she went to live in China as the unhappy wife of a drunken US Navy officer and ended up leaving him and entering a world of hedonism, intrigue (both politics and sexual) and all manner of complex relationships amid the glamour - and dangers - of Shanghai and Peking during the Jazz Age. Rumours of her behaviour in China - notably the infamous ‘Shanghai Grip’ she was alleged to have learned in a high class brothel - would be used against her many years later.

Paul French, an expert in Chinese history, has researched every aspect of Wallis’s time in China and his book, Her Lotus Year, brings that lost world to life - and nails a few myths. It also explains how and why Wallis became the formidable woman that she was.

You can buy Paul's book, and all the books we feature on the podcast here, along with thousands of others in our special Scandal Mongers bookshop...

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/her-lotus-year-china-the-roaring-twenties-and-the-making-of-wallis-simpson-paul-french/7624169?aid=12054&ean=9781783968183&

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Mok O'Keefe - aka 'The Gay Aristo' - returns to the podcast this week as a guest host. Mok - who lives in an actual castle - is a great fan of all things Gothic and so he's the perfect person to help Phil explore the scandalous life of Lord Byron and his circle of friends, and the creation of classic gothic tales during a memorable summer in a small villa near Lake Geneva.

It was here that Bryon, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and other staged a writing competition that created Frankenstein and the first modern Vampire novel.

Romani academic Madeline Potter is fascinated with the writers of this period and brings her expert knowledge - and enthusiasm for all things Transylvanian - to the conversation.

You can buy the books we feature on the podcast here, along with thousands of others...

https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/scandalmongers

Phil's upcoming book on 1945 is now available for pre order in the UK. It will be published in April 2025 in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/1945-Reckoning-Empire-Struggle-World/dp/139971449X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=#

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When BBC reporter Rory Cellan Jones uncovered a pile of old love letters under his mother Sylvia's bed after she died, he unearthed the secret story of his own life.

The result was a bestselling book of real power and intelligence, in which he reconstructs the scandalous relationship that created him - but that also limited his mother’s life choices and ensured that he would not know who his father was for many years.

Rory joins Phil to talk about his life, his mother and father, and the lost world of the 1950s and 60s - where smart young women could sometimes forge exciting careers but society looked very unkindly at love affairs that crossed age and class barriers.

You can buy Rory's book - and thousands of others - in our own online bookstore...

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/ruski...

**We now have a Thank You button (next to the ’three dots’) for small donations that help support our work**

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Phil has the latest on the semi-public tug of war over Prince Andrew’s living arrangements. How much longer can he cling on to Royal Lodge?

And why do key figures in the British establishment find it so easy to cling onto power and position for so long, despite the most shocking scandals? The story of the Archbishop of Canterbury this week may help us understand.

Historian Adrian Phillips then joins Phil to talk about the endlessly fascinating subject of Winston Churchill in an entirely original way - through his strange collection of friends.

You can buy Adrian’s book - and thousands of others - in our own online bookstore...

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/winston-s-bandits-churchill-and-his-maverick-friends-adrian-phillips/7711924?aid=12054&ean=9781785907890&

***We now have a Thank You button (next to the ’three dots’) for small donations that help support our work***

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This week we dip into the remarkable - and often scandalous - world of military intelligence with historian Helen Fry.

Her widely acclaimed new book Women in Intelligence reveals a huge number of fascinating stories of the critical - and often deadly - work done by British and American women throughout the 20th Century. Some of these stories - and these brave womens’ lives - have been kept deeply secret until the last few years.

You can buy Helen's book, and all the books we feature on the podcast here, along with thousands of others

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/women-in-intelligence-the-hidden-history-of-two-world-wars-helen-fry/7428008?aid=12054&ean=9780300260779&

***We now have a Thank You button (next to the ’three dots’) for small donations that help support our work***

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Phil considers the feedback from last week’s remarkable interview with David Hooper and asks what Diana, Princess of Wales might have been told when she first agreed to go on holiday with Mohamed Al Fayed. 

Then this week’s guest - our friend Clive Irving - joins Phil to reveal the story behind perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of the aviation business - the fall of the house of Boeing? As an aviation nut (as is Phil!) Clive spent years chronicling the golden age of this great American company and then had a ring side seat as its image - and tragically its planes as well - quickly fell apart. What went wrong, and what can be salvaged from the wreckage?

***We now have a Thank You button (next to the ’three dots’) for small donations that help support our work***

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Top British lawyer David Hooper has made a career out of standing up to the powerful and the wealthy, and so when Vanity Fair magazine needed someone to defend its groundbreaking 1995 expose of Mohamed Al Fayed - the first time sexual allegations about him were ever published - David was the natural choice. What happened next was extraordinary, as revealed by David to Phil in this special and exclusive interview.

For two years Hooper faced a small army of private detectives, ex police, spin doctors and various other suspicious characters, all working for Fayed. There was an attempted entrapment, the suggestion of bribes being paid to serving police officers and endless pressure on witnesses. And then, after the tragedy in Paris, both sides withdrew from the case and Fayed was able to carry on - it is alleged - predating on women with little scrutiny for another quarter of a century.

You can buy David's book, and all the books we feature on the podcast here, along with thousands of others...

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/buying-silence-how-oligarchs-corporations-and-plutocrats-use-the-law-to-gag-their-critics-david-hooper/7539510?aid=12054&ean=9781785908316&

***We now have a Thank You button (next to the 'three dots') for small donations that help support our work***

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