
Part of Series
More addictive and mind-blowing true tales from history, told by Giles Milton―one of today’s most entertaining and accessible yet always intelligent and illuminating historians In When Churchill Slaughtered Sheep and Stalin Robbed a Bank, the second installment in his outrageously entertaining series, History’s Unknown Chapters, Giles Milton shows his customary historical flair as he delves into the little-known stories from history, like when Stalin was actually assassinated with poison by one of his inner circle; the Russian scientist, dubbed the “Red Frankenstein,” who attempted to produce a human-ape hybrid through ethically dubious means; the family who survived thirty-eight days at sea with almost no water or supplies after their ship was destroyed by a killer whale; or the plot that served as a template for 9/11 in which four Algerian terrorists attempted to hijack a plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower.
Author

British writer and journalist Giles Milton was born in Buckinghamshire in 1966. He has contributed articles for most of the British national newspapers as well as many foreign publications, and specializes in the history of travel and exploration. In the course of his researches, he has traveled extensively in Europe, the Middle East, Japan and the Far East, and the Americas. Knowledgeable, insatiably curious and entertaining, Milton locates history's most fascinating—and most overlooked—stories and brings them to life in his books. He lives in London, where he is a member of the Hakluyt Society, which is dedicated to reprinting the works of explorers and adventurers in scholarly editions, some of which he uses in his research. He wrote most of Samurai William in the London Library, where he loves the "huge reading room, large Victorian desks and creaking armchairs". At home and while traveling, he is ever on the lookout for new untold stories. Apparently he began researching the life of Sir John Mandeville for his book The Riddle and the Knight after Mandeville’s book Travels "literally fell off the shelf of a Paris bookstore" in which he was browsing. Copyright BookBrowse.com 2007