This is a new author for me. I read a lot of historical fiction now and particularly enjoy books about WWII or the Nazi’s. The Dictator’s Muse focuses on aspects of Hitler and the Nazi’s and a perspective I haven’t encountered before so it offered something new. The chapters switched between the point-of-view of Leni, Kim and Alun, gradually revealing how they become entwined in each other’s lives and the darkness that links them, especially Kim and Alun as Kim is unaware how Alun truly came to part of his life and what his sinister motivations are. I found this well-written, engrossing and intense at times as the book heads deeper into darkness. I thought this was a terrific read.

I was intrigued by this book, Leni Riefenstahl was a fascinating character who walked a precarious line throughout WWII in Germany, however for me it reads more like the story of the the lives, relationships and friendships between Kim Newlands, Connie Dalton and Alun Pryce - with Leni playing a tumultuous part in their lives.
There is an underlying theme of who new what during WWII, which is interesting.
The ending was disappointing, both the storyline of Kim, Connie and Alun and that of Leni feel unfinished, but it is still an enjoyable read.

I was given a copy of The Dictator's Muse by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.

I enjoyed this book very much. Historical fiction featuring real people is a favourite of mine, as is anything to do with Naziism and British Fascism. Leni Riefenstahl is a great character to base a book around and this is well written and with a good storyline and it is another hit from Nigel Farndale. With thanks to NetGalley, the publishers and the author for an e-ARC of this title.

I loved this book. Dark and dangerous, atmospheric and wonderfully descriptive, this is a definite page turner.

The characters are engaging, with plenty of depth. They draw you in, taking you from high to low and back again, on an emotional roller coaster ride, throughout their greatest triumphs and darkest moments.

Gripping all the way, from beginning to end, I couldn't put it down. A fantastic addition to my bookshelf

Nigel Farndale focuses on the pre-WW2 years in Germany and England, the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, the Blackshirts. Leni Riefenstahl, the innovative and sexually liberated film maker loved by Hitler and seen as the Nazis poster girl, her propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will elevated Hitler to a Wagnerian deity, a messiah for the German nation. She is entrusted with filming the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Olympia), where the black Jesse Owens upsets Germany's propaganda apple cart by winning 4 gold medals. In 2005, 32 year old Sigrun Meier is at Leni's home, her will granting Meier sole access to her film archives, where a short film of a unknown blonde British athlete has her embarking on a journey to find out more about him, a mission that is to have personal implications for her.

Kim Newland is an impoverished, good looking British athlete with ambitions of winning more than one gold medal at the Olympics which he hopes will make him an acceptable prospect for his girlfriend Connie's aristocratic family. She is a shallow lightweight social butterfly, taking nothing seriously, even flirting with the idea of joining the Blackshirts. Kim is struggling to find enough time to train, he has to work, having failed to secure any finance, as a last resort he is desperate enough to join the BUF, to attain funds from Mosley. Alun Pryce is a passionate radical, a Welsh communist agitator, who is responsible for the serious injuries sustained by Connie at a Blackshirts rally. Feeling guilt, he gets to know her in the hospital, becoming close to Connie and Kim, a friendship that develops into love for Connie, spiraling into obsession, and an out of control jealousy.

Tasked with infiltrating the BUF, Alun is in Berlin with Connie, where Newland catches the eye of Leni, and where a fateful set of events follow that are to haunt all of them in the future. I thought this was a terrific piece of historical fiction, but I did have a few problems with it. The role of Sigrun feels like a clumsy insertion to fulfil a specific function, she appears only at the beginning and the end of the novel, and I felt uneasy at the more benign depiction by the author of Leni and her relationship with the Nazis, and Kim and Connie's membership of the BUF, compared with that of Alun, a communist and committed antifascist, who played a central role in the Battle of Cable Street. Otherwise, this is a great and fascinating read, that will appeal to those wanting to know more about the iconic film maker Leni Riefenstahl and for those interested in this turbulent period of history. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

I was slightly underwhelmed by The Dictator’s Muse. I enjoyed The Blasphemer very much but I didn’t think this had quite the same focus or impact.

I’m very cautious about reading novels about the Nazi era, but Leni Riefenstahl is an interesting and complex subject and I trusted Nigel Farndale to write a well researched and non-exploitative book about her. I was right in that the research and tone were good, but this book is only rather tangentially about Riefenstahl. She is a major character, but the real focus of the book is a tangled love triangle between Connie, an aristocratic woman, Kim, a working class athlete who is secretive about both his class and his Jewish roots and Alun, a passionate communist. These three become involved in the politics of the period leading up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Kim joins Moseley’s blackshirts because he needs their sponsorship to compete and Alun does the same to infiltrate and subvert the movement.

This dominates much of the novel, with Riefenstahl playing an important but not a central role. I was disappointed by this, especially as I found the fictional characters a little implausible; they’re certainly not stereotypes, but they do feel rather familiar and slightly artificial, as though they have been created specifically to illustrate the points which Farndale is making. He does have things to say about love, conflicts of loyalty, extremism and whether ends justify means, for example, but I wasn’t sure I was getting anything really new here. Add to this a slightly clunky structure of the 1936 action being framed by a 21st-Century researcher making some slightly implausible discoveries about Riefenstahl and the book wasn’t as insightful as I’d hoped.

On the plus side, Farndale writes well, the prose carries you along nicely, there are some very gripping scenes – a quietly terrifying visit from Heydrich, for example - and I did read to the end. It’s by no means a bad book and plenty of people will enjoy it, I suspect; it’s just that I’d hoped for more.

(My thanks to Doubleday for an ARC via NetGalley.)

This was an interesting story set in pre-war Germany about the film maker Leni Riefenstahl as she made her film of the 1933 Munich Olympics. The story moves to London and tells of an athlete ,Kim Newlands ,and his girlfriend,Connie Dalton ,who are BUF party members ,and a Communist, Alun Pryce ,who infiltrates the BUF and plays a large part in the events that follow.
There are lots of interesting details about the film making process and about Riefenstahl and her links to the Nazi party.I wasn’t quite so convinced by the sub-plot and found the ending a bit rushed and hard to believe ,but overall the book held my attention and I wanted to know what happened throughout.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in return for an honest review which reflects my own opinion.

Nigel Farndale breathes new life in to the past with his story about Kim Newlands, the English athelete hoping for gold in the 1936 Olympics. Kim comes across as the perfect innocent abroad and a pretty decent chap. His relationship with Connie seems fraught to fail if you bring his background and her family in to the equation but unto itself, naively lovely. The vibrant and highly focused Leni Riefenstahl falls for his good looks and athelticism and elicits his help in multiple shoots of him jumping under unusual lighting conditions. It's these films which bind the story across the mists of time.
From family anecdotes, Nigel Farndale describes the heady prewar Germany quite skillfully. I found the book very hard to put down and a pleasure to pick up again.
However, I would like to point out that pistons don't turn, wheels do and the description of the radio communication equipment was poor indeed and barely accurate. Those niggles aside, I would like to give it five stars.

The Dictator's Muse encourages the reader to take a sympathetic view of Leni Riefenstahl. Leni wanted love like any woman and liked her men to look a certain way. She may not have been a member of the Nazi Party but she certainly gave it a lot of good public relations. I had to swallow a bit of distaste.
That aside, it's a good story. Kim is an athlete completely out of his depth and easily manipulated while Alun is a weak and jealous man. Poor Kim is chewed up and spat out, while worse people prevail. A lot of famously unpleasant people are in this book, like Goebbels and Oswald Mosley. They had a lot of people fooled. It's important to remember that while right-wing ideologues live amongst us now.

I was a bit hesitant to read this one because it is big challenge for an author to incorporate real people into a work of fiction. It was a bit of a slow start but once you get an idea of where it could all be going, it becomes a lot more interesting. The author paints a believable picture of a difficult period in history and manages to create a credible fictionalised version of Leni Riefenstahl. His other characters are more believable. It's a good book to read if you want to find out more about this particular time and it will probably encourage you to find out more. Worthwhile.

I quite enjoyed this but it was a little different to what I was expecting.

There is a lot of politicism in this book. The main characters were strong and their relationships developed well.

I was a little underwhelmed, at times, by the subplot.

Many thanks to the author and NetGalley for gifting me this arc in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

The Dictator's Muse appealed to me as it takes place before World War II, when rumours are rife and the world is on the brink of war. Unfortunately it didn't live up to its synopsis.

The subject itself is fascinating - the Berlin Olympics of 1936, the worries of fascism and communism across Europe and a new British King who seems sympathetic to Hitler.

Yet in making this a fictitious book, the author tried too hard to combine multiple historical events, characters and timelines. Throughout the book there was something lacking. Leni's story was the most compelling, but we never got enough to feel satisfied. Kim featured more, but wasn't so interesting; if anything, we learned too much about him. As for Connie and Alun, they were both unlikeable with appalling behaviour. This made the ending a huge disappointment.

I would actually have preferred a more in-depth account of the Olympics, Leni's films and Jesse Owens. The inclusion of the unrest in the UK added nothing and made the book far too long. There was also unnecessary description throughout, which could be cut to make the pace more engaging.

Sigrun was a worthy addition and the story there provided a link to the modern world. The ending however, was quite farfetched and left us with many unanswered questions. There is much lost to time, but this was fiction, so the author could have given us more to round off the book nicely.

The Dictator's Muse has inspired me to read more about Leni Riefenstahl, but the rest of the story was sadly underwhelming and dragged.

I am not too fond of historical fiction, particularly war stories but I did find this quite interesting. I thought Kim was not believable as an athlete and he was a bit weak and easily manipulated. Would Connie really have fallen for him? The ending stretches credulity a little but it was quite well written and had a well- structured plot.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I had been looking to read a novel that included aspects of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts and this novel certainly fulfilled this objective. The Berlin Olympics, the strength of the Third Reich in the lead up to World War 2, fascism and communism made for an engrossing read.

It is not until half way through, that the various main characters converge when the novel hits the high notes. An extremely well researched novel, full of historical facts and background to Europe at this precarious time. A swift moving and thoughtfully constructed novel, sensitive and unsettling.

Whitewashing those who flirted with the Blackshirts?

Sadly, I was less enchanted with this one than I had hoped. There are always certain challenges with writing more recent historical, using real people interwoven with fictional ones.

In some ways this is less about Riefenstahl, and more about a triad of invented characters who have complex relationships with each other. Connie, the Honourable Constance Lavinia Emily Dalton, is a kind of stand-in for those Mitfords who were more attracted to the far-right, giddy, bold, entitled and often unthinking. Kim Newlands is a promising athlete who flirts with membership of Mosley’s party, partly for reasons connected with his athletic hopes for the 1936 Olympics, partly because Connie, whom he is in love with is attracted towards the ‘style’ aspects of the British Union of Fascists, and has absorbed the cultural thinking of her class. Finally there is a character whose political sympathies are very different.

Mainly set before the outbreak of war, when fascism was certainly on the rise, both in Germany and in this country. 1933-1936, there is also a bookend device of dual timescale. Sigrun Meier, a woman in her 30’s, a film historian who is obsessed/fascinated by Riefenstahl, is investigating her life and work in 2005.

I wasn’t always particularly convinced by the Meier sections. I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but all I can say, particularly of the final sections, is credulity was stretched to breaking point, given normal lifespans. Yes, I know that Riefenstahl was 101 when she died in 2003, but given law of averages, writers of fiction should probably avoid having too many characters achieving exceptional longevity outside carehomes.

Sometimes I was over-aware of too much research being heavily inserted (a meeting between Riefenstahl and Hitler in one of his apartments, which gets described (the apartment) in perhaps too much detail.

One of my major problems, causing me to feel somewhat uneasy, is that there is a definite whitewash of the central fictional characters who get drawn in to connection with the BUF – and even Leni herself is sympathetically handled. The most perfidious character, almost from the off, is a communist. Somehow, our flirters with the BUF are characters who at core, are moral, and their connection was not who they really are, it was just some kind of foolish young mistake.

I’m stumped here, as to say more is to really reveal spoilers, but I found the apportioning of villainry quite disturbing

I found this really well written, compelling and fascinating. Riefenstahl is such a complex figure, both admirable and deluded, and the storylines woven around her effectively demonstrate what this meant for other people even if she couldn’t see it herself.

This book is set in both the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and the build up to the Second World War, and concerns revolutionary film maker, Leni, her lover, a British athlete, and in the modern day, an academic researcher fascinated by the period and the life of Leni in particular. The period was compelling in its juxtaposition of extreme right and extreme left wing views, and the story explores both with excellent research and deeply human stories. If all this makes the book sound terribly worthy, it’s not. What it is is a cracking good story, with the added impact of the tensions in Europe at the time giving it extra impact. I can’t recommend this book highly enough for its research, its characterisations and its readability - it’s one of those books that will stay with the reader long after it ends.

My thanks to Nigel Farndale, Random House and Net Galley for the ARC of THE DICTATOR'S MUSE. A very interesting book about Leni Riefenstahl, a film maker who was chosen by Adolph Hitler to make a film about the 1939 Olympic Games in Germany. Kim Newlands is a British athlete who finds himself caught up with the Blackshirts and when they offer to sponsor him, he cannot resist. His socialite girlfriend Connie thinks it's a hoot to become a Blackshirt and doesn't take it seriously, but when she's injured at a rally, everything changes for them, particularly when the person who threw the missile that injured her befriends them. Alun Price, a member of the Communist Party who infiltrates the Blackshirts feels guilty when he sees what injury he has caused Connie, but his guilt turns to desire for her and he is determined to get Kim out of the picture. When Leni falls for Kim Alun does everything he can to make sure he is caught with her even if it is innocent and he lies to Connie about Kim's real feelings.
In another time Sigrun Meier is a historian exploring the life of Leni, and the tale Nigel Farndale tells weaves the stories of both women together in a very surprising ending.

An intriguing tale set in the build up to World War 2. Two individuals have careers - sports and film making -which result in them getting enmeshed in the rising fascist movement. Both need the backing of the leaders, Hitler and Mosley, but question or ignore the dark side of their benefactors.

There are many different angles to this story; characters, devotion to causes and people, doomed politics and a dual timeline. It is superbly written and everything comes together with a satisfying twist. A fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable read.

Many thanks to Netgalley, Doubleday and Penguin Random House UK for the opportunity to read this fabulous book and for my opinion and review.

Sigrun Meier approaches the door with some trepidation, here she is at the home of Helene "Leni" Riefenstahl, famous film producer who achieved worldwide accolades and was creator of the propaganda films for Hitler, speculation was that it was her brilliance that created the Hitler myth. Sigrun had completed her PhD on Leni and while alive she had attempted to meet her but with each trip to this famous house her efforts stayed fruitless, rejected on each occasion. Now here she is and as stipulated in Leni's Will, she alone will be able to view all the archived films. While in this process, a surprise captures Sigrun's attention, a clip of Jesse Jackson, the 1936 Berlin Olympics and with him a blond good looking British athlete. Sigrun reflects; typically Leni, always attracted to this type of masculinity. Contrary to what she has been instructed Sigrun makes the decision to keep this small film clip and to try and discover something about the young man.

The read goes back in time to create an outlining story that will involve a young Englishman, an aspiring Olympian and his association with Leni Riefenstahl along with an English girl Connie and a Welshman, Alun.

London 1933 Kim Newland, a hurdler and now through circumstances an aspiring broad jumper in training for the Berlin Olympics. He has an upper class girlfriend Connie, her father, a Lord and he knows as a penniless athlete he is out of her league. However, with the expectations of a Gold Medal in 3 years time he feels this achievement would serve him well. Through his circumstances and with time running out for him to find a financial sponsor he makes a fateful decision. He joins the Blackshirts with the view of acquiring one. The Olympics are purely for amateur participation and specific guidelines are in place regarding financial assistance.

On another political side, Alun Pryce, a dedicated Communist has an impressive arsenal of weapons to assist in the members' infiltration at the Blackshirts' next rally. In the foray of the rally of opposing sides and with the violence Connie is badly hurt and Alun is knocked out. Both are taken to hospital where, Alun on becoming conscious discovers that it was probably one of his particularly nasty projectiles that wounded her. In speaking to Connie she recognises his Welsh accent and Alun in turn discovers that she is the daughter of Lord Dalton whom his mother works for as a scullery maid. Alun, due to his exceptional intellect through one of his teachers convincing his parents of his potential has been well educated and from the influence of university he has formed his political allegiance. He forms an attachment to Connie that moves to obsession and jealousy. He infiltrates the Blackshirts as a spy to gain the trust of Kim and Connie and armed with the information of Kim's bursary, financial sponsorship Alun sets about to expose him.

All the while in Germany Leni is having to deal with the nasty Dr Goebbels who idolises her and it's only in his position as Reich Minister of Propaganda and Hitler's closest confidant that Leni while despising the little man is fully aware of his power and needs to be constantly on guard. However, her mind is concentrating on her next project, a film about the upcoming Nuremberg Rally, The Triumph of Will. The read continues with the story of Leni giving great detail of this famous woman.

1936 all head off to Berlin, Connie pays for Alun to accompany her. By now his obsession with her has increased and his undermining of her relationship with Kim picks up pace. Kim on the other hand has settled into the Olympic Village and during a training session Leni introduces herself to him. She is really taken by this good-looking Englishman and with her now in the position as the producer of the propaganda film for the event uses this guise to impose herself on him.

Kim's Olympic dream is shattered and with Alun constantly on his case to Connie, she ends the relationship and returns to England. Leni picks up the pieces of Kim's life and offers him some sanctuary until he returns to England where he attempts to contact Connie, however Alun is always there manipulating the truth. Finally Kim comes to realise all of Alun's lies for which he confronts him, not to be out maneuvered Alun plans a trap for Kim.

Finally returning to the present, Sigrun travels to England to research the story on Kim Newland and with some assistance she is able to discover some detail about him, Connie and Alun. With FOI changes she is given a sealed envelope. Both Connie and Alun are still alive and finally as she brings these two old people together and with the sealed government document in hand, Alun is confronted with his past deeds. Connie on the other hand recognises the ring Sigrun wears for which the final piece of the puzzle is put into place.