Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Andy McNab

They were like a band of brothers... 
 
In 1983 Andy McNab was assigned to B Squadron, one of the four Sabre Squadrons of the SAS, and within it to Air Troop, otherwise known as SEVEN TROOP. 
 
This is Andy McNab's gripping account of the time he served in the company of a remarkable group of men - from the day, freshly badged, he joined them in the Malayan jungle, to the day, ten years later, that he handed in his sand-coloured beret and started a new life. The links they forged then bound them inextricably together, but the things they saw and did during that time would take them all to breaking point - and some beyond - in the years that were to follow. He who dares doesn't always win...

Seven Troop

Bryan Sykes

Bryan Sykes, the world's first genetic archaeologist, takes us on a journey around the family tree of Britain and Ireland, to reveal how our tribal history still colours the country today. 
 
In 54BC Julius Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. His was the first detailed account of the Celtic tribes that inhabited the Isles. But where had they come from and how long had they been there? When the Romans eventually left five hundred years later, they were succeeded by invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Did these successive invasions obliterate the genetic legacy of the Celts, or have very little effect? 
 
After two decades tracing the genetic origins of peoples from all over the world, Bryan Sykes has now turned the spotlight on his own back yard. In a major research programme, the first of its kind, he set out to test the DNA of over 10,000 volunteers from across Britain and Ireland with the specific aim of answering this very question: what is our modern genetic make-up and what does it tell us of our tribal past? Are the modern people of the Isles a delicious genetic cocktail? Or did the invaders keep mostly to themselves forming separate genetic layers within the Isles? 
 
As his findings came in, Bryan Sykes discovered that the genetic evidence revealed often very different stories to the conventional accounts coming from history and archaeology. Blood of the Isles reveals the nature of our genetic make-up as never before and what this says about our attitudes to ourselves, each other, and to our past. It is a gripping story that will fascinate and surprise with its conclusions.

Blood of the Isles

David Hall

Fred Dibnah was a man born out of his time. His era should have been the 'magnificent age of British engineering' - the nineteenth century - and his heroes were the great industrial engineers of the period whose prolific innovations and dedicated work ethic inspired a national mood of optimism and captured the hearts of the British public. 
 
Fred Dibnah's Victorian Heroes tells the stories of some of these men - including George and Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Joseph Whitworth - and what it was that made them such inspirational figures to Fred. What were their backgrounds? Where did their drive and vision come from? What sort of people were they at work and at home? And what was their contribution to the history of industry and engineering? 
 
Most of them - like Fred - were colourful, larger-than-life characters for whom no challenge was too great. Taking these fascinating characters as inspiration, Fred Dibnah's Victorian Heroes gets to the very heart of what allowed nineteenth-century Britannia to rule the waves . . .

Fred Dibnah's Victorian Heroes

Margaret Humphreys

THE BOOK THAT EXPOSED THE HEARTBREAKING SCANDAL OF BRITAIN'S FORGOTTEN AND ABUSED CHILD MIGRANTS - now a film, Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson. 
In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire, right up until as recently as 1970. 
 
Many were told that their parents were dead, and parents were told that their children had been adopted. In fact, for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. Margaret and her team reunited thousands of families before it was too late, brought authorities to account, and worldwide attention to an outrageous miscarriage of justice.

Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

Evan Wright

Generation Kill is about the young men sent to fight their nation's first open-ended war since Vietnam. Despite the flurry of media images to come of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have never really met any of these people, who serve as front-line troops. For whatever reason, the media simply doesn't get them. As we all know, news accounts of the last two wars focused almost exclusively on battlefield imagery of high-tech weapons wreaking astounding destruction, comply with analysis from retired army grandees and other experts, punctuated by the odd heart-warming patriotic sound-bite. The troops themselves play a role in the media's presentation of recent wars rather like extras in The Triumph of the Will. They are everywhere yet somehow invisible. When they speak you get the sense that what they are saying has been carefully scripted. Now Generation Kill tells the soldiers' story in their own words. 
 
The narrative focuses on a platoon of 23 marines, many of them veterans of Afghanistan, whose elite reconnaissance unit spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This is the story of young men that have been trained to become ruthless killers. It's about surviving death. It's about taking part in a war many questioned before it even began. 
 
Evan Wright was the only reporter with First Recon, which operated well ahead of most other forces, usually behind enemy lines. They were among the first marines sent into the fight and one of the last units still engaged on the outskirts of Iraq, even after the city centre fell. Generation Kill is not just a combat chronicle but an inside look at how people fighting in war actually experience it. It is both an action narrative like Black Hawk Down and a detailed portrait of a generation at war along the lines of Band of Brothers. It is not a book you are going to forget in a hurry...

Generation Kill

Harold G Moore

Joseph L. Galloway

'If you want to know what is was like to go to Vietnam as a young American... and find yourself caught in ferocious, remorseless combat with an enemy as courageous and idealistic as you were, then you must read this book. Moore and Galloway have captured the terror and exhilaration, the comradeship and self-sacrifice, the brutality and compassion that are the dark heart of war' THE TIMES 
 
THE MUST READ CLASSIC OF THE VIETNAM WAR 
 
In November 1965, 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt.Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. 
 
Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War. How these men persevered - how they sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up - is both inspiring and devastating. 
 
General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of the men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders, to present a picture of soldiers facing the sort of brutal challenge they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. 
 
It is a spellbinding true portrait of warfare at its most visceral and desperate, which reveals to us, as rarely before, the extraordinary resources man can summon in the darkest of hours.

We Were Soldiers Once...And Young

Lewis Alsamari

Aged 17, Lewis Alsamari was conscripted into the Iraqi army. Things went from bad to worse once his superiors discovered his ability to speak English, and Lewis was selected for Saddam's elite, top secret intelligence service, an offer he literally could not refuse. This left him with only one option - to escape from his native land, leaving his family behind him... 
 
Going under the wire of the army compound where he was posted, Lewis was shot in the leg, making his escape - which required a gruelling journey in disguise across the desert at night with a group of Bedouin, at the mercy of ravenous wolves - all the more arduous. Against the odds, Lewis survived this trek, made it across the border into Jordan, and eventually sought asylum the UK, where he had spent his childhood. 
 
Now he had to work out how to rescue his mother, brother and sister, who had been apprehended by security forces and thrown into jail once Lewis's escape became known. The only thing which could help was money and lots of it, so Lewis fraudulently transferred £37,000 from the accounts of William Hill (where he had a temporary job) into his own bank, and wired it to Baghdad in order to pay the necessary bribes. But, of course, it wasn't quite that simple... 
 
Out of Iraq is an exhilarating and terrifying story of one man's escape from one of the harshest regimes of the modern era. It is testament both to the strength of the human spirit and to the extremes we'll go to in order to keep our loved ones safe.

Out of Iraq

John Man

Genghis Khan is one of history's immortals: a leader of genius, driven by an inspiring vision for peaceful world rule. Believing he was divinely protected, Genghis united warring clans to create a nation and then an empire that ran across much of Asia. 
 
Under his grandson, Kublai Khan, the vision evolved into a more complex religious ideology, justifying further expansion. Kublai doubled the empire's size until, in the late 13th century, he and the rest of Genghis’s ‘Golden Family’ controlled one fifth of the inhabited world. Along the way, he conquered all China, gave the nation the borders it has today, and then, finally, discovered the limits to growth. 
 
Genghis's dream of world rule turned out to be a fantasy. And yet, in terms of the sheer scale of the conquests, never has a vision and the character of one man had such an effect on the world. 
 
Charting the evolution of this vision, John Man provides a unique account of the Mongol Empire, from young Genghis to old Kublai, from a rejected teenager to the world’s most powerful emperor.

The Mongol Empire

Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China

Sattareh Farman-Farmaian

Sattareh Farman Farmaian, the daughter of a once-powerful and wealthy Iranian prince, was raised and educated in the 1920s and 1930s in a Persian harem compound, along with numerous mothers and more than 30 brothers and sisters. As a young woman, she broke with Muslim tradition and travelled to America, where she became the first Persian to study at the University of Southern California. Her new life in the West fired a vision to lift her own people out of backwardness and poverty, and she returned to Iran to found the Tehran School of Social Work. For more than 20 years, Sattareh and her students waged a war against poverty, disease and overcrowding, and then, soon after the collapse of the Shah's regime, she was forced to flee the country in fear of her life. In this account of her experiences, she provides an insider's view of Iran's journey through the 20th century and of the events which led up to, and followed, the Islamic revolution.

Daughter Of Persia

James Carnac

This memoir was recently discovered and appears to have been written in the 1920s by somone who asserts that he was Jack the Ripper. 
 
This person is James Carnac, this memoir written shortly before his death is an account of his entire life, including a few short months in 1888 when he became the murderer known to posterity as Jack the Ripper. 
 
This book introduces a new suspect for the infamous murders in Whitechapel in 1888. There is information in this book that does not appear to be derived from contemporary newspapers or any other publications and the descriptions of Tottenham in the 1870s, the visits to performances of Jekyll and Hyde, the intricate geography of Whitechapel in 1888 are written with pin-point accuracy. There is also a credible motive given for James becoming the murderer Jack and also a reason for the end of the murders. Given the fact that the author also appear to have knowledge about aspects of the case not in the public arena at the time it could be that this actually is the autobiography of Jack the Ripper. 
 
Ultimately it is up to the reader to decide if they believe the mystery has been solved at last but even if they end up deciding the account to be a work of fiction it would still be one of the very earliest imaginings of the Ripper case, written in the early years of the twentieth century, a fascinating piece of period writing and a worthy addition to the Ripper canon. 
 
Whatever side they come down on there is no question that this book will be a source of much debate.

The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper

Christabel Bielenberg

Following the extraordinary success of her wartime memoirs, The Past Is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg received thousands of letters from readers begging her to describe what happened next. The Road Ahead takes up the story at the moment the first volume left off - with the outbreak of peace. 
 
Germany was devastated by war and its aftermath, while Britain seemed grey and exhausted to Christabel. She was soon appointed the Observer's special correspondent in Germany, and, reunited with her husband, Peter (technically an enemy alien), she joined the struggle for reconciliation with, and the rebuilding of, a defeated nation. It was Peter's near-fatal accident and her own illness which decided the young couple to turn their backs on England and Germany and make a new start farming in Ireland. 
 
Life was harsh at first, but predictably Christabel found humour in the accidents of poverty and the many mishaps of country life. The beautiful scenery of the Wicklow Mountains provided a haven for the family and for the hosts of young people from all over the world who joined them each summer. Christabel became involved with the Peace Women of Northern Ireland and learned as much as she could about the adopted country she had grown to love so passionately. Taking her seventieth birthday as a stopping point for a life that even now, some fourteen further years on, is as rich and full as it ever was, she looks back with characteristic modesty and gratitude. Her readers will be enchanted by this second volume of memoirs, as clear-sighted and generous, as honest, funny, touching and brave as The Past Is Myself.

The Road Ahead

The Ninjas today are the stuff of myth and legend in comics, film and electronic games. But once they were real, the medieval equivalent of the SAS: spies, saboteurs, assassins. In their secrecy, under-cover skills and determination to survive, they were the opposite of the overt, self destructive samurai. Could they fly? Make themselves invisible? Of course not.It was just that their skills gave them a magical aura. As a result, martial artists and story-tellers have turned them into fantasy creatures, from James Bond to Mutant Turtles. 
 
In Ninja John Man goes in search of the truth. In a journey to the heartland of the ninjas, he takes us from their origins over 1,000 years ago, through their heyday in the civil wars that ended with Japan’s unification in 1600. But that was not the end of the ninja ethos. That re-emerged in World War Two as a little-known counterpart to Japanese militarism. Ninja ways live on in the real ‘last of the ninjas’, Hiroo Onoda, who held out in the Philippine jungle for 30 years.

Ninja

James Holland

'James Holland is a master' BBC History 
 
It was to be the battle to end the air war once and for all. 
 
During the third week of February 1944, the combined Allied air forces launched their first-ever round-the-clock bomber offensive against Germany. 
 
The aim was to smash the main factories and production centres of the Luftwaffe and at the same time draw the German fighter force up into the air and into battle. 
 
Big Week is the knife-edge story of bomber against flak gun and fighter, but also, crucially, fighter against fighter. Following the fortunes of pilots and aircrew from both sides, this is a blistering narrative of one of the most critical periods of the entire war. Big Week was the largest air battle ever witnessed, but it has been largely forgotten – until now.

Big Week

The Biggest Air Battle of World War Two

From the top ten bestselling author of Normandy 44 and Sicily 43 
 
The Second World War is the most cataclysmic and violent sequence of events in recent times. But for the past seven decades, our understanding of it has relied upon conventional wisdom, propaganda and an interpretation skewed by the information available. James Holland has spent over twelve years conducting new research, interviewing survivors, visiting battlefields and archives that have never before been so accessible and challenging too-long-held assumptions about the war that shaped our world. 
 
In Germany Ascendant, the first part of this ground-breaking new history, James Holland introduces the war, beginning with the lead-up to its outbreak in 1939 and taking us up to mid-1941 as the Nazis prepared to unleash Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. To tell the real story, he weaves together the experiences of dozens of individuals, from civilians and soldiers, to sailors, pilots, leading military strategists, industrialists and heads of state, and uncovers the strategy, tactics and events that informed not only the military aspects of the war but also the economic, political, and social aspects too. 
 
The War in the West is a truly monumental history of the war on land, in the air, and at sea. In it, James Holland has created a captivating and epic narrative which redefines and enhances our understanding of one of the most significant conflicts in history.

The War in the West - A New History

Volume 1: Germany Ascendant 1939-1941

'A devastating new account..Holland knows his stuff when it comes to military matters' Daily Mail, Book of the Week 
'A superb account of the invasion that deserves immense praise. To convey the human drama of Normandy requires great knowledge and sensitivity. Holland has both in spades' The Times 
________________ 
 
Renowned World War Two historian James Holland presents an entirely new perspective on one of the most important moments in recent history, unflinchingly examining the brutality and violence that characterised the campaign. 
 
D-Day and the 76 days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed have come to be seen as a defining episode in the Second World War. Its story has been endlessly retold, and yet it remains a narrative burdened by both myth and assumed knowledge. 
 
In this reexamined history, James Holland presents a broader overview, one that challenges much of what we think we know about D-Day and the Normandy campaign. The sheer size and scale of the Allies' war machine ultimately dominates the strategic, operational and tactical limitations of the German forces. 
 
Drawing on unseen archives and testimonies from around the world and introducing a cast of eye-witnesses including foot soldiers, tank men, fighter pilots and more, James Holland's epic telling profoundly recalibrates our understanding of its true place in the tide of human history. 
 
The new, sweeping World War II book from James Holland, THE SAVAGE STORM, is available now.

Normandy ‘44

D-Day and the Battle for France

The epic Sunday Times bestseller

Mike Rossiter

'We believed in ourselves so much, no one ever panicked, even when the situation looked so desperate. We all believed that our best chance of staying alive was to stick together.' 
 
Flying Lancaster bombers was one of the most dangerous missions of the war. Yet night after night Flight Lieutenant Geoffrey King and the crew of C Charlie risked their lives in the skies over Germany. Together they faced incredible dangers, flak damage, close encounters with the fighter planes of the Luftwaffe, and crash landings. 
 
Against this background a friendship was formed that bound the crew of C Charlie together against all odds. 
 
Geoffrey King and the crew of C Charlie are unique in having flown together for fifty missions and living to tell the tale. Bomber Flight Berlin is the story of a group of ordinary men, from different walks of life, thrown together by the forces of war. It is the story of those missions above Berlin, as they flew into what seemed certain death, and aircraft all around them were blasted out of the sky. It is also a testament to a remarkable friendship.

Bomber Flight Berlin

Tom Abraham

Tom 'Bud' Abraham was one of the very few Englishmen to serve in Vietnam. As an officer in the 1st Cavalry Division during 1967/8, he saw combat in some of the fiercest encounters of the war. His gallantry earned him a chestful of medals, including the Silver Star, one of the highest decorations awarded by the American Army. 
 
During the Tet Offensive, Tom was captured by the Vietcong. The suffering he endured during his interrogation and torture tested him to the limits, and yet his daring escape into the surrounding jungle was the beginning of a new ordeal. His struggle to survive, naked and alone, would drag him down to the level of a primitive beast. 
 
After he returned to England from Vietnam, Tom made a new life. He married, became a father, and started a successful career in business. It seemed that he had forgotten the nightmare of the past. But more than thirty years later, a trivial encounter with the police began a catastrophic chain of events. He lost everything - his family, his home, his self-respect. It became all too obvious that the psychological and emotional wounds he received in Vietnam were still festering. 
 
In trying to rebuild his life, Tom had once more to confront those traumatic memories that he had buried so deep. If he were to have any chance of a future, he would have to relive the past. His terrifying yet inspiring journey is the story of this book.

The Cage

Immediate Action is a no-holds-barred account of an extraordinary life, from the day Andy McNab was found in a carrier bag on the steps of Guy's Hospital to the day he went to fight in the Gulf War. 
 
As a delinquent youth he kicked against society. As a young soldier he waged war against the IRA in the streets and fields of South Armagh. As a member of 22 SAS Regiment he was at the centre of covert operations for nine years - on five continents. 
 
Recounting with grim humour and in riveting, often horrifying, detail his activities in the world's most highly trained and efficient Special Forces unit, McNab sweeps us into a world of surveillance and intelligence-gathering, counter-terrorism and hostage rescue.There are casualties: the best men are so often the first to be killed, because they are in front. 
 
By turns chilling, astonishing, violent, funny and moving, this blistering first-hand account of life at the forward edge of battle confirms Andy McNab's standing in the front rank of writers on modern war.

Immediate Action

EMPTY CRADLES is a powerful testament to an ordinary woman's astonishing dedication, compassion and stubborn courage. 
 
In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker and mother of two, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret Humphreys soon discovered that this woman's story was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. As many as an estimated 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children's homes in Britian and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire - the last as recently as 1967. 
 
Many of the children were told that their parents were dead. Their parents, too, were often deceived; many believed that their children had been adopted in Britain. The reality was very different: for numerous children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in institutions in Western Australia and elsewhere. 
 
Margaret Humphreys reveals how she gradually unravelled this shocking secret; how she became drawn into the lives of some of these innocent and unwilling exiles, how it became her mission to reunite them with their families in Britain, and how her lonely crusade led to the founding of the Child Migrants Trust. 
 
EMPTY CRADLES is a strong indictment of government, as well as charitable and religious organisations. It is a sad, harrowing story that will move the reader to anger and tears. Yet it offers a message of hope to all the victims of a shameful scandal that has been ignored for too long.

Empty Cradles

J.M. Maloney

'A tale of survival.' Daily Mail 
 
'Survival against the odds ... [an] amazing story.' The Sun 
 
In 1939 Annie Jarman and her six young daughters were evacuated from their south London home and sent to the Sussex countryside to wait out the war. Refusing to be parted, they faced the unknown together, never imagining just how much their lives would change. 
 
 From the trials and tribulations of leaving London, the destructive horror of the Blitz and terrible family tragedy to dances, romances and the triumph of making a new life in the country, The Sisters of Battle Road is the compelling true story of six ordinary girls in extraordinary wartime circumstances. 
 
 Today, the six young girls – Mary, Joan, Sheila, Kathleen, Patricia and Ann – are six remarkable women who have lived to tell their tale of sisterhood and its unbreakable bonds in the shadow of World War Two.

The Sisters of Battle Road

The Extraordinary True Story of Six Sisters Evacuated from Wartime London

Malcolm McPherson

Their mission was straightforward - to set up an Al Qaeda observation post in the south-eastern mountains of Afghanistan. No-one was expecting any difficulties. 
 
Instead three men - a Navy SEAL, an Air Force Combat Air Controller and an Army Ranger platoon commander - were pinned down by hostile fire on top of Takur Ghat mountain. Only one of them survived to recall the horrors of what became a truly terrible day . . . The resulting rescue mission turned into a seventeen hour battle that left seven soldiers dead. 
 
Roberts Ridge is the visceral story of those seventeen hours. With access to Pentagon generals, the SEALS and the survivors, Malcolm MacPherson takes the reader deep into the heart of the battle of Takur Ghat and brings us face to face with the reality of the new war against terrorism.

Roberts Ridge

SURVIVOR STORIES FROM DUNKIRK, NOW THE SUBJECT OF A MAJOR FILM FROM CHRISTOPHER NOLAN 
 
When Britain declared war against Germany in September 1939, thousands of young men sailed across the English Channel to fight for their country. Among them were the seven soldiers who share their stories in this book. Some joined up out of patriotism, others for adventure or the prospect of a secure wage. They were fit, trained and proud to wear the armband of the British Expeditionary Forces. 
 
 For many, the first months were strangely peaceful, but when the Germans invaded in May 1940 they advanced with shocking speed. The German armoured columns sliced through neutral Holland and Belgium. The French Army collapsed and within a week the soldiers of the BEF were forced to retreat. Fighting tough and bloody rearguard actions, they endured relentless shelling and fearsome dive-bomb attacks. Constantly on the move, and facing a German onslaught on three fronts, they were soon exhausted, hungry and low on ammunition. They headed finally to their one chance of salvation: the beaches of Dunkirk. 
 
 Mike Rossiter tells the stories of seven veterans who went through a hellish baptism of fire in the first battles on the front line, and fought in the last-ditch defence of Dunkirk. They saw their comrades bombed and drowned off the beaches. Their accounts give us a fascinating and privileged insight into the reality of the war and what it was really like to face the German Blitzkrieg in 1940. They take us from the confident, idyllic days of the phoney war in the French countryside to the sudden shock of battle, from the fear and confusion of retreat to the wait for an uncertain rescue. These are the compelling stories of seven men who are proud to say I Fought at Dunkirk.

I Fought at Dunkirk

Seven Veterans Remember Their Fight For Salvation

James Fergusson

Southern Afghanistan in the early 1990s was in even greater chaos than it is now. The Russians, who had occupied the country throughout the 1980s, were long gone. The disparate ethnic and religious leaders who had united to eject the invaders - the famous mujaheddin - were at each others' throats. For the rural poor of Kandahar province, life was almost impossible. 
 
On 12 October 1994 a small group of religious students decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by an illiterate village mullah with one eye, some 200 of them surrounded and took Spin Boldak, a trucking stop on the border with Pakistan. From this short and unremarkable border skirmish, a legend was born. The students' numbers swelled as news of their triumph spread. The Taliban, as they now called themselves - taliban is the plural of talib, literally 'one who seeks knowledge' - had a simple mission statement: the disarmament of the population, and the establishment of a theocracy based on Sharia law. They fought with a religious zeal that the warring mujaheddin could not match. 
 
By February 1995, this people's revolt had become a national movement; 18 months later Kabul fell, and the country was effectively theirs. James Fergusson's fascinating account of this extraordinary story is be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the situation in Afghanistan, now and for the future...

Taliban

the history of the world’s most feared fighting force

Since the time of the ancient Greeks we have been fascinated by accounts of the Amazons, an elusive tribe of hard-fighting, horse-riding female warriors. Equal to men in battle, legends claimed they cut off their right breasts to improve their archery skills and routinely killed their male children to purify their ranks. 
 
For centuries people believed in their existence and attempted to trace their origins. Artists and poets celebrated their battles and wrote of Amazonia. Spanish explorers, carrying these tales to South America, thought they lived in the forests of the world’s greatest river, and named it after them. 
 
In the absence of evidence, we eventually reasoned away their existence, concluding that these powerful, sexually liberated female soldiers must have been the fantastical invention of Greek myth and storytelling. Until now. 
 
Following decades of new research and a series of groundbreaking archeological discoveries, we now know these powerful warrior queens did indeed exist. In Amazons, John Man travels to the grasslands of Central Asia, from the edge of the ancient Greek world to the borderlands of China, to discover the truth about the warrior women mythologized as Amazons. 
 
In this deeply researched, sweeping historical epic, Man redefines our understanding of the Amazons and their culture, tracking the ancient legend into the modern world and examining its significance today.

Amazons

The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World

Abandoned as a baby, Andy McNab's start in life was tough. Growing up in South London with foster parents, and surrounded by poverty, he attended seven schools in as many years, disillusioned and in remedial classes. It wasn’t long before his life descended into petty crime. By the age of sixteen, he was in juvenile detention. 
 
Recruited into the Army from there, it soon became apparent that he had the reading age of an eleven year old. The next six months in the Army education system changed his course of his life forever. Today Everything Changes is the inspiring story of when life changed for Andy McNab.

Today Everything Changes

Quick Read

Matt Gallagher

Iraq, late 2007. Lieutenant Matt Gallagher arrives just as US policy shifts from lethal operations to counter-insurgency. He encounters a world where nothing is as it seems. Friends are enemies, reconciliation is war, roads are bombs and silence is deadly. Nothing left to do except 'embrace the suck'... 
 
...and blog about it. Matt Gallagher's response was to write an on-line journal (called Kaboom) which quickly went viral. Read by thousands of soldiers who recognised its unflinchingly honest portrayal of the real war, as well as high-ranking Pentagon officials and interested parties around the world, Kaboom was shut down by the US Army in June 2008. Now you can read the whole story, based on that brilliant, acerbic, banned blog. Kaboom paints a shockingly original and uncompromising portrait of a savage war the world is still struggling to understand.

Kaboom

Diana Preston

Michael Preston

In 1631, the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, ordered the construction of a monument of unsurpassed splendour and majesty in memory of his beloved wife. Theirs was an extraordinary story of passionate love: although almost constantly pregnant - she bore him fourteen children - Mumtaz Mahal followed her husband on every military campaign.But then Mumtaz died in childbirth. Blinded by grief, Shah Jahan created an exquisite and extravagant memorial for her on the banks of the river Jumna. The Taj Mahal took twenty years to build and depleted the Moghul treasuries.But Shah Jahan was to pay a greater price for his obsession. He ended his days imprisoned by his own son in Agra Fort, gazing across the river at the monument to his love. The building of the Taj Mahal had set brother against brother and son against father in a savage conflict that pushed the seventeenth century's most powerful empire into irreversible decline.

A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time

The Story of the Taj Mahal

Mary Main

Maria Eva Duarte de Peron was born in poverty in 1919 and died of cancer in 1952, at the age of 33, the richest and most powerful woman in Argentina. Her story is one of the most fantastic in history. Driven by a compelling ambition, she made her way to Buenos Aires and set about becoming an actress. In a very short time she had climbed to the top of Argentina's military-social ladder until at last she met Colonel Juan Peron -and her climb took a new direction. 
 
Here is the story of 'Evita' and how her rise to power became an almost unbelievable account of intrigue, bloodshed, and pure chicanery. Her multimillion-dollar tour of Europe; her setting up of the Eva Peron Foundation whereby she cornered the market on clothes, toys, books, groceries, imported drugs, medical equipment, and housing; her impassioned campaign speeches; her shameless flaunting of jewels and clothes in the very faces of her worshipping 'shirtless ones' - these are but a few of the facets of her incredible career that are described in detail. 
 
There was a fatal fascination about Eva Peron that remains, even after her death - an aura of evil that has become a legend.

Evita: The Woman With The Whip

Robert Mason

'I read this as a young pilot about to embark on a career flying military helicopters. It should have put me off for life. Robert Mason tells a gripping account of the relentless courage and heroism amidst the insanity of the Vietnam war. The final few pages are the most shocking I have read in any book.' Tim Peake 
________ 
 
A stunning book about the right stuff in the wrong war. 
 
As a child, Robert Mason dreamed of levitating. 
 
As a young man, he dreamed of flying helicopters - and the U.S. Army gave him his chance. 
 
They sent him to Vietnam where, between August 1965 and July 1966, he flew more than 1,000 assault missions. In Chickenhawk, Robert Mason gives us a devastating bird's eye-view of that war in all its horror. 
 
He experiences the accelerating terror, the increasingly desperate courage of a man 'acting out the role of a hero long after he realises that the conduct of the war is insane,' says the New York Times. 
 
'And we can't stop ourselves from identifying with it.' 
 
CHICKENHAWK contains the most vivid, astoundingly intense descriptions of flying ever written. It is a devastating account of men at war, of courage and cowardice, boredom and exhilaration, lasting friendship and sudden death. It is not a book for weak stomachs, but its powerful message will stay in the memory long after the last page is turned.

Chickenhawk

Richard Dannatt

General Sir Richard Dannatt's distinguished career in the army has spanned thirty-eight years and seen him serve in many different theatres of conflict, from Northern Ireland (where he was awarded the Military Cross) to Bosnia and Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. His experiences have forged an unwavering loyalty to the fighting British soldier. 
 
As Chief of the General Staff, he was given overall command of the British army at a time when the fighting was fiercest in Afghanistan. But from his very first day in the job, General Dannatt proved himself a courageous leader and a forceful advocate for his men, never shying from controversy to tell the truth as he found it. 
 
More than any leader in recent times, Dannatt has used his position of command to get a better deal for the British soldier - the right equipment, the right conditions, the right reward - to do the job we ask of them. His leadership and example have shaped the debate about the role of the professional army in modern warfare. 
 
Leading from the Front is General Sir Richard Dannatt's reflections on a life of military service which offers a characteristically frank analysis of whether Britain's defence strategy is fit to deal with the numerous threats we will face in the 21st century.

Leading from the Front

An autobiography

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