This is a history of the Second World War - as you have never heard it before.





Dancer, singer and intelligence agent Josephine Baker



German Nazi pianist Elly Ney



British pianist Myra Hess



Composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor



Ballerina Tatiana Vecheslova



Violinist Alma Rosé, conductor of the Auschwitz women's orchestra



Jazz band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm





Prize-winning author Leah Broad brings to life the unsung stories of the trailblazing women who entertained the troops, fought for their country in secret and kept hope alive on the home front. Spanning Britain, Europe, Russia, and the United States, she reveals how these pioneering musicians shaped wartime culture, and how their private lives were in turn transformed, whether resisting or perpetrating national ideologies.





Unsung shows how these extraordinary women fought to perform, to create, to exist - and forges a radical new soundscape of the twentieth century.



Dr. Leah Broad is the acclaimed author of Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World, which won the 2024 Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Storytelling, among other awards. Winner of the 2015 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism, her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Financial Times, and London Review of Books. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, Broad is a frequent on-air guest and regularly speaks at events including the BBC Proms. https://www.leahbroad.com/