5ive Guys FC

82ASK

A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Malcolm Folley

**THE ONLY DEFINITIVE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST RACE - FULL OF EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS WITH NIKI LAUDA, ROSS BRAWN, DAMON HILL, DAVID COULTHARD, SIR JACKIE STEWART, OLIVER PANIS AND 2016 WORLD CHAMPION NICO ROSBERG** 
 
Circuit de Monaco. Monte Carlo. The ultimate race in the Formula One calendar. 
 
When you think of Formula One, you think of Monaco. Once a year, yachts jam the harbour, celebrities fill the stands and luxury sports cars litter the streets as of thousands of people gather from across the world to watch the greatest, and one of the oldest, races in motorsport. 
 
Monaco is glamorous, prestigious and seductive. But for the drivers, it is the most demanding race of the year. The narrow streets, tight corners and sharp elevations make it the ultimate test of driving skill. It is physically draining and mentally exhausting. 
 
Proposed today, the race would not exist but it remains the jewel in the crown for every Formula One driver. There is simply no other race like it. 
 
 Win at Monaco and your name is etched in history. You will join the likes of Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton. 
 
With exclusive interviews and insight from drivers and a wealth of F1 insiders, award-winning sportswriter Malcolm Folley goes behind the scenes to discover what it's really like to drive and live and breathe this iconic circuit. He reveals along the way a unique and definitive portrait of the circuit, and recreates in thrilling detail its most extraordinary weekend, when only three cars finished.

Monaco

Inside F1’s Greatest Race

Dame Vera Lynn

Virginia Lewis-Jones

In the year of her 100th birthday, Dame Vera Lynn's fascinating and life-affirming wartime memoir from the forces' sweetheart's of her adventures entertaining the troops in far-flung Burma. 
 
'I was just twenty-seven years old when I went to Burma. It was an experience that changed my life for ever. Up until that time I had not really travelled anywhere at all, apart from one touring visit to Holland with a band I was singing with before the war, and I had certainly never been in an aeroplane. But I wanted to make a difference, to do my bit.' 
 
And she did. 
 
Written with her daughter, Virginia Lewis-Jones this is a powerful and life-affirming account of the time she spent with troops in wartime Burma. Based, in part on a diary she kept, alongside unpublished personal letters and photographs from surviving veterans and their families, it explores why it was such a life-defining event for her and shows how her presence helped the soldiers, airmen and others who heard her sing.

Keep Smiling Through

My Wartime Story

James Sharpe

*Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Times, History Today and the Sunday Telegraph* 
 
‘Wonderfully entertaining, comprehensive and astute.’ The Times 
 
‘Genuinely hard to put down.’ BBC History Magazine 
 
 
From murder to duelling, highway robbery to mugging: the darker side of English life explored. 
 
Spanning some seven centuries, A Fiery &amp; Furious People traces the subtle shifts that have taken place both in the nature of violence and in people’s attitudes to it. How could football be regarded at one moment as a raucous pastime that should be banned, and the next as a respectable sport that should be encouraged? When did the serial killer first make an appearance? What gave rise to particular types of violent criminal - medieval outlaws, Victorian garrotters – and what made them dwindle and then vanish? Above all, Professor James Sharpe hones in on a single, fascinating question: has the country that has experienced so much turmoil naturally prone to violence or are we, in fact, becoming a gentler nation? 
 
 
 
‘Wonderful . . . A fascinating and rare example of a beautifully crafted scholarly work.’ Times Higher Education 
 
‘Sweeping and ambitious . . . A humane and clear-eyed guide to a series of intractable and timely questions.’ Observer 
 
‘Deeply researched, thoughtfully considered and vividly written . . . Read it.’ History Today 
 
‘Magisterial . . . The outlaw’s song has surely never been better rendered.’ Times Literary Supplement

A Fiery & Furious People

A History of Violence in England

Charles Drazin

‘Patsy, what are you going to be when you grow up? Well?’ 
'A Royal Engineer, Daddy. A Royal Engineer!’ 
 
Charles Drazin knew little about his mother's father – only that he had been a military surveyor who mapped great swathes of the British Empire. But when his mother was told that she was dying, it prompted recollections of her early life that she had never confided before: of the village in the west of Ireland where she had grown up, and of her father, whose death changed the life of an eight-year-old girl for ever. 
 
Soon afterwards her own death left her son to go through alone the relics of her life. They included a box of old photographs, a battered suitcase stamped with the initials of the grandfather he had never known, and the service records of Patrick’s brothers, who, like him, had all enlisted in the Royal Engineers as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. So began an extraordinary journey of discovery that took him from the age of Queen Victoria to the battlefields of the Western Front. 
 
Mapping the Past is the story of five brothers who, mapping the world, lived up to the Royal Engineers’ motto of Everywhere. It is the story of Ireland, and of the Empire from which it broke away. It is the story of conflict, war and its aftermath. And, most of all, it is the story of memory, endlessly carrying the past, for better or worse, into our present and future. It is an imaginative, intimate and powerful work of history, by a writer of rare power.

Mapping the Past

A Search for Five Brothers at the Edge of Empire

Chris Marnewick

*THE GRIPPING NEW DRAMA AS SEEN ON NETFLIX* 
 
South Africa, 1987. Apartheid. When Leon, a white 19-year-old prison guard working on death row commits an inexplicable act of violence, killing seven black men in a hail of bullets, the outcome of the trial - and the court’s sentence - seems a foregone conclusion. 
 
Hotshot lawyer John Weber (played by Steve Coogan) reluctantly takes on the seemingly unwinnable case. A passionate opponent of the death penalty, John discovers that young Leon worked on death row in the nation’s most notorious prison, under traumatic conditions: befriending the inmates over the years while having to assist with their eventual execution. 
 
As the court hearings progress, the case offers John the opportunity to put the entire system of legally sanctioned murder on trial. How can one man take such a dual role of friend and executioner, becoming both shepherd and butcher? Inspired by true events, this is the story that puts the death penalty on trial and changes history.

Shepherds and Butchers

Laddie Lucas

A unique and enthralling anthology compiled by WWII flying ace, Laddie Lucas, Voices in the Air tells the story of the air battles of the Second World War in the voices of those who took part. Drawn largely on the writings of the combatants themselves from all sides of the conflict, this book offers a vivid and highly individual account of the great aerial campaigns of WWII. From a thrilling account of the first sustained dogfight between Spitfire and Messerschmitt in 1940, to an eighteen-year-old Japanese suicide pilot's last letter home and the Luftwaffe leaders' analysis of 'what went wrong' after the Battle of Britain, the book dramatically deals with every aspect of the war. Full of stories of astonishing escapades, incredible bravery, dogged persistence and moving feats of arms, Voices in the Air honours both the sung and the unsung heroes of the war.

Voices In The Air 1939-1945

Jonathon Green

The language of crime has a long and venerable history - in fact, the first collection of words specifically used by criminals, Hye-Way to the Spittel House, dates from as early as 1531. Jonathon Green is our national expert on slang, and in Crooked Talk he looks at five hundred years of crooks and conmen - from the hedge-creepers and counterfeit cranks of the sixteenth century to the blaggers and burners of the twenty-first - as well as the swag, the hideouts, the getaway vehicles and the 'tools of the trade'. Not to mention a substantial detour into the world of prisons that faced those unlucky enough to be caught by the boys in blue. 
 
If you have ever wondered when the police were first referred to as pigs, why prison guards became known as redraws, or what precisely the subtle art of dipology involves, then this book has all the answers.

Crooked Talk

Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime

Natalie Livingstone

'It covers three centuries of high living, high politics and high drama [...] it is so fascinating' MEL SYKES 
_____________________________ 
A Sunday Times bestseller 
Five women. One house. One extraordinary history. 
 
Even today, Cliveden retains its royal mystique - it is where Meghan Markle and her mother spent the night before the royal wedding - but from its construction in the 1660s to its heyday in the 1960s, Cliveden has played host to a dynasty of remarkable and powerful women. 
 
Anna Maria, Elizabeth, Augusta, Harriet, and Nancy were five ladies who, over the course of three centuries, shaped British society through their beauty, personalities, and political influence. 
 
Restoration and revolution, aristocratic rise and fall, world war and cold war form the extraordinary backdrop against which their stories unfold. 
 
An addictive history of the period and an intimate exploration of the timeless relationships between people and place, The Mistresses of Cliveden is a story of sex, power and politics, and the ways in which exceptional women defy the expectations of their time.

The Mistresses of Cliveden

Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

David Nobbs

As a small boy David Nobbs survived the Second World War unscathed, until his bedroom ceiling fell on him when the last bomb to be dropped on Britain by the Germans landed near his home. It was the nearest he came to the war, but National Service would later make him one of Britain's most reluctant soldiers. It was an unforgettable and often unpleasant experience. 
 
As a struggling writer, David was catapulted into the thrilling world of satire at the BBC when he rang THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS with a joke and got through to David Frost, who sent a taxi for the joke. He never looked back. His greatness as a modern comic writer was confirmed by the publication of THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN, which he adapted into the immensely successful television series that has entered the fabric of British cultural life, through phrases, images and brilliant humour. 
 
A mesmerising, beautifully told tale of life in writing and comedy, I DIDN'T GET WHERE I AM TODAY is the hilarious, poignant and very personal story of David Nobbs' life, which also describes some of the most famous comedians of the last century and captures a golden age of British television.

I Didn't Get Where I Am Today

Isobel Charman

During the First World War three quarters of a million British people died – a figure so huge that it feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people's day-to-day lives. We resort to looking at the war from a distance, viewing its events in terms of their political or military significance. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is different. Like the all-star ITV series it accompanies, it immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of real people who lived through the war. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs – many of which have never previously been published – Isobel Charman has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of people such as separated newly-weds Alan and Dorothy Lloyd, plucky enlisted factory-worker Reg Evans and proudly independent suffragist Kate Parry Frye. A century on, they here tell their stories in their own words, offering a uniquely personal account of the conflict. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is both a meticulously researched piece of narrative history and a deeply moving remembrance of the extraordinary acts of extremely ordinary people.

The Great War

A Nation's Story

The People's Story (Official TV Tie-In)

Richard Littlejohn

‘Littlejohn’s large-hearted nostalgia and aggression tempered with humour, remain a necessary tonic.’ The Times 
 
Born when wartime rationing was still in force and children ran free and wild, the world in which Richard Littlejohn grew up feels like it could be another country, let alone another century. 
 
In Littlejohn’s Lost World, he goes in search of his old childhood haunts - and instead finds an England changed beyond recognition. From the covered market that is now a 30-storey Dubai-style tower block to his old primary school, where today twelve different languages are spoken. 
 
From Muffin the Mule to Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival, Littlejohn takes us on a funny and poignant journey to a time and a place we will never see again. 
 
'His is the story of millions of others. If you, like him, feel that world has vanished forever, then you will find it vividly recreated in this captivating memoir.' Daily Mail

Littlejohn's Lost World

Pamela Cox

Annabel Hobley

‘[Go] behind the glamorous shop fronts and the glitzy shop floors of Britain’s department stores... Here the hidden history is revealed.’ Saga Magazine 
 
Meet the shopgirls and hear their incredible true stories of life behind the counter. 
 
In this lively and colourful history, we join shopgirl Chili Bouchier on her journey from the small ladies’ department at Harrods to star of the silver screen, and experience the raw courage of John Lewis’ Miss Austin during the Blitz in the West End. We follow Margaret Bondfield as she goes undercover, fiercely championing the rights of her fellow shopgirls; and stand alongside the impoverished interwar chain store assistants who stole stockings to supplement their meagre wages. And we celebrate with the art school entrepreneurs who kick-started the boutique movement of the swinging ’60s and made the shop floor their own. 
 
Here, these wonderful tales of friendship, hardship and triumph are revealed as never before. 
 
For fans of nostalgic history and memoir, including Call the Midwife; Mollie Moran's Aprons and Silver Spoons; and The Sugar Girls

Shopgirls

True Stories of Friendship, Hardship and Triumph From Behind the Counter

The True Story of Life Behind the Counter

Nigel McCrery

A crime scene. A murder. A mystery. 
 
The most important person on the scene? The forensic scientist. And yet the intricate details of their work remains a mystery to most of us. 
 
Silent Witnesses looks at the history of forensic science over the last two centuries, during which time a combination of remarkable intuition, painstaking observation and leaps in scientific knowledge have developed this fascinating branch of detection. Throwing open the casebook, it introduces us to such luminaries as 'The Wizard of Berkeley' Edward Heinrich, who is credited with having solved over 2000 crimes, and Alphonse Bertillon, the French scientist whose guiding principle 'no two individuals share the same characteristics' became the core of identification. Along the way, it takes us to India and Australia, Columbia and China, Russia, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. And it proves that, in order to solve ever more complicated cases, science must always stay one step ahead of the killer.

Silent Witnesses

Alex Kershaw

_______________________ 
The true story behind the hit NETFLIX drama 
 
From the invasion of Italy to the gates of Dachau, no World War II infantry unit in Europe saw more action or endured worse than the one commanded by Felix Sparks. 
 
The US Army 157th regiment, known as the Thunderbirds, drew many of its men from more than fifty different Native American tribes, mixed in with Mexican-Americans and men more used to herding cattle in the American southwest. Felix Sparks, tasked with leading the diverse regiment regarded by generals as one of the US's finest fighting forces, was a maverick officer, and the only man to survive his company's wartime odyssey from bitter beginning to victorious end. 
 
Here, his remarkable true story is told for the first time, along with those of the men who bravely fought alongside him. 
_______________________ 
'Exceptional....The Liberator balances evocative prose with attention to detail and is a worthy addition to vibrant classics of small-unit history like Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers' Wall Street Journal 
 
'A revealing portrait of a man who led by example and suffered a deep emotional wound with the loss of each soldier under his command ... The Liberator is a worthwhile and fast-paced examination of a dedicated officer navigating - and somehow surviving - World War II.' Washington Post 
 
'A history of the American war experience in miniature, from the hard-charging enthusiasm of the initial landings to the clear-eyed horror of the liberation of the concentration camps.' The Daily Beast 
 
'Kershaw has ensured that individuals and entire battles that might have been lost to history, or overshadowed by more 'important' people and events, have their own place in the vast, protean tale of World War II ... Where Kershaw succeeds, and where The Liberator is at its most riveting and satisfying, is in its delineation of Felix Sparks as a good man that other men would follow into Hell - and in its unblinking, matter-of-fact description, in battle after battle, of just how gruesome, terrifying and dehumanizing that Hell could be.' Time

The Liberator

One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey From the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau

Max Decharne

Over seven centuries London has changed dramatically - from walled medieval settlement to bustling modern metropolis. But throughout its history there has been one inescapable constant: murder. It winds through the heart of the capital as surely as the River Thames. 
 
Capital Crimes tells the story of crime and punishment in the city, &shy;from the killing of infamous 'questmonger' Roger Legett during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 through to the hanging of Styllou Christofi in 1954. Along the way we encounter such shocking characters as railway murderer Franz Muller, the ‘baby farmers’ of Finchley and the notorious political assassin John Bellingham. Some are well known, some obscure; the lives and fates of all, however, have much to tell us, providing a glimpse into the workings of London’s mysterious underworld and reminding us that dark deeds are not so far removed from everyday life as we would perhaps like to believe.

Capital Crimes

Seven Centuries of London Life and Murder

Diane Atkinson

Caroline Norton, born in 1808, was a society beauty, poet and pamphleteer. Her good looks and wit attracted many male admirers, first her husband, the Honourable George Norton, and then the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. 
 
After years of simmering jealousy, George Norton accused Caroline and the Prime Minister of a ‘criminal conversation’ (adultery) resulting in a trial referred to as ‘the scandal of the century’. 
 
Cut off and bankrupted by George Norton, she went on to become one of the most important figures in changing the law for wives and mothers.

The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton

Peter Caddick-Adams

The five-month Monte Cassino campaign in central Italy is one of the best-known European land battles of World War Two, alongside D-Day and Stalingrad. It has a particular resonance now, because Cassino, with its multitude of participating armies - most notably the American 5th Army under the controversial General Mark Clark - was perhaps the campaign of the Second World War that most closely anticipates the coalition operations of today, with its ever-shifting cast of players stuck in inhospitable, mountainous terrain, pursuing an objective set by unknowing politicians in distant capitals, where victory is difficult to define. 
 
Monte Cassino was characterised by the destruction of its world famous Abbey: in retrospect, considered an unjustifiable act of cultural vandalism by the allies.The audit trail of decision-making to destroy an icon as well known then as the Eiffel Tower or Lincoln Memorial, is a chilling reminder that similar decisions are still being made in Iraq and Afghanistan and indeed Libya. To this day, reversing normal prejudice, German troops are welcome in the abbey, having rescued its treasures from allied destruction in February 1944. 
 
Cassino was an unusual campaign for World War II in that its outcome was not reliant on sweeping movements or the use of tanks or aircraft - but by old-fashioned boots in the mud, whether capturing the town of Cassino after months of grinding urban warfare (a Stalingrad in miniature) or scrambling up the steep mountain to seize the heights and the religious complex on top of Monte Cassino. 
 
Monte Cassino Abbey was painstakingly rebuilt after the war (its baroque chapel remains incomplete) and is now a World Heritage site. An hour south of Rome, it is visited each year by up to one million tourists and pilgrims from around the world.

Monte Cassino

Ten Armies in Hell

Jonathan Goodman

Collected together in The Daily Telegraph Murder File are nerve-jangling accounts from a century of murder. Taken intact from the Telegraph's superlative domestic crime pages, they range from the lurid, through the chilling, to the touching and sometimes tragic. 
Linking these fascinating contemporary extracts is commentary by crime expert Jonathan Goodman. He looks at the background to the murders and the evolving ways of reporting them, and introduces some of the influential figures, from judges to executioners, responsible for their trial and sometimes capital punishment.

The Daily Telegraph Murder File

President Bill Clinton

In Back to Work, Bill Clinton offers a plan to get America out of its economic crisis and "back into the future business." 
 
Clinton details how to lay a foundation for long-term prosperity, offering specific recommendations on how to boost employment rates, increase bank lending and corporate investment, and double exports. 
 
He emphasises that antigovernment sentiments in the public rarely contribute to a prosperous growth. Conflict between the government and the private sector has given the U.S. a weak economy, growing income inequality, and a decline in its competitive position. Cooperation, he stresses, is more conducive to success than conflict. 
 
To Clinton, America “at its core is an idea – the idea that no matter who you are or where you're from, if you work hard and play by the rules, you'll have the freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams.” Back to Work is an effort to rejuvenate the idea that is America.

Back to Work

Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy

Neil Root

Murder has transfixed the popular press for centuries. But it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that murder began saturating front pages and making these monsters what we today recognise as modern celebrities. 
 
It was three serial killers, caught and executed in the few years after the end of the Second World War, who precipitated a level of public furore never seen before. Neville Heath, a 'charming' sadist who killed two women; John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Killer who killed between six and nine men and women; and John Christie, the ineffectual necrophile, who killed between six and eight women. The modern news coverage finds its roots with these three men whom the crime historian Donald Thomas called the 'Postwar Psychopaths'. Their crimes were the first to generate a tabloid frenzy the like of which we see all around us today. It was not only the murderers who captured the public's imagination. It was the detectives who hunted them down, the judiciary who tried them, and the man who executed them, the legendary hangman Albert Pierrepoint. 
 
This book tells the stories of these three infamous serial killers against the backdrop of the tabloid frenzy that surrounded them.

Frenzy!

How the tabloid press turned three evil serial killers into celebrities

Albert Jack

Did you know that an assassin is a hashish-eater and a yokel a country woodpecker? 
 
That Dr Mesmer mesmerised patients back to health or that Samuel Pepys enjoyed a good game of handicap? 
 
While we're at it, what have spondulics to do with spines or lawyers with avocados? 
 
In It's a Wonderful Word, bestselling author Albert Jack collects over 500 of the strangest, funniest-sounding and most delightful words in the English language, and traces them back to their often puzzling origins. While brushing up on your gibberish or gobbledygook, discover why bastards should resent travelling salesmen, why sheets should remain on tenterhooks and why you should never set down a tumbler before finishing your drink. 
 
From blotto to bamboozle and from claptrap to quango, Albert Jack's addictive anecdotes bring the world's most colourful language to life and are guaranteed to surprise and entertain.

It's a Wonderful Word

The Real Origins of Our Favourite Words

Two men came to personify British and German generalship in the Second World War: Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel. They fought a series of extraordinary duels across several theatres of war which established them as two of the greatest captains of their age. Our understanding of leadership in battle was altered for ever by their electrifying personal qualities. Ever since, historians have assessed their outstanding leadership, personalities and skill. 
 
The careers of both began on the periphery of the military establishment and represent the first time military commanders proactively and systematically used (and were used by) the media as they came to prominence, first in North Africa, then in Normandy. Dynamic and forward-thinking, their lives also represent a study of pride, propaganda and nostalgia. Caddick-Adams tracks and compares their military talents and personalities in battle. Each brought something special to their commands. Rommel's breathtaking advance in May-June 1940 was nothing less than inspired. Montgomery is a gift for leadership gurus in the way he took over a demoralised Eighth Army in August 1942 and led it to victory just two months later. 
 
This compelling work is both scholarly and entertaining and marks the debut of a major new talent in historical biography.

Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives

Robert Frump

In 1983, the freighter Marine Electric ran into a violent storm off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Despite Force 10 conditions and fifty feet waves the crew were unconcerned: the ship had survived worse. But something was wrong, the ship was beginning to break up under them; gradually it began to go down by the head, then to capsize. Within two hours the crew were in the water in a desperate struggle for their lives. Their plight sparked one of the most dramatic air-sea rescues in maritime history. 
 
Only three of the 34 crew survived the night. The ship had sunk due to a serious structural defect. The chief mate Bob Cusick discovered that the owners had lost several other ships in similar circumstances to the Marine Electric, but the sinkings had been covered up. He decided to go after the company and they in turn rounded on him, the sole surviving officer. What follows is an epic and epochal court case that left none of the participants unscarred.

Until The Sea Shall Free Them

Hugo Vickers

Hugo Vickers has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Royal Family, and has had a fascination with the story of the Duchess of Windsor since he was a young man. There have been a number of books about this doomed couple, but this book brings a new perspective on the story by focussing on the later years of exile. 
 
While Vickers has his own theories about the Abdication itself, and he makes it very clear that Mrs Simpson did not lure the King from the throne, the drama of this narrative comes from the criminal exploitation of an old sick woman after the death of her husband. She was ruthlessly exploited by a French lawyer called Suzanne Blum. Some members of the Royal Family, like Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, don't emerge with much credit either. 
 
Hugo Vickers relates a tragic story which has lost none of its resonance over the years since the Duchess died in 1986.

Behind Closed Doors

Steve Roud

From conkers to marbles, from British Bulldog to tag, not forgetting 'one potato, two potato' and 'eeny, meeny, miny, mo', The Lore of the Playground looks at the games children have enjoyed, the rhymes they have chanted and the rituals and traditions they have observed over the past hundred years and more. 
 
Each generation, it emerges, has had its own favourites - hoops and tops in the 1930s, clapping games more recently. Some pastimes, such as skipping, have proved remarkably resilient, their complicated rules carefully handed down from one class to the next. Many are now the stuff of distant memory. And some traditions have proved to be strongly regional, loved by children in one part of the country, unknown to those elsewhere. All are brilliantly and meticulously recorded by Steve Roud, who has drawn on interviews with hundreds of people aged from 8 to 80 to create a fascinating picture of all our childhoods.

The Lore of the Playground

The Children's World - Then and Now

Paul Johnson

In the course of a long and successful career as a journalist and author, Paul Johnson has known popes, presidents, prime ministers, painters, poets, playwrights, even the foul-mouthed publican Muriel Belcher, who ran the legendary Colony Club. Harking back to the scandalously anecdotal 17th century book by John Aubrey on the celebrities of his times, Brief Lives is the distilled essence of Johnson's experience of a complex variety of people who have contributed to our political, spiritual and cultural life. 
 
He advised Margaret Thatcher, counselled Princess Diana, had a drawing of him done by Ernest Hemingway and enjoyed the company of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter at Buckingham Palace. He has been an insider, outside observer and universal commentator on the individuals who have changed history, formed public taste or simply lightened our lives by their presence.

Brief Lives

New York Times bestselling author Alex Kershaw has written the first full biography of one of the most remarkable men to have outwitted Hitler - Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swedish diplomat who almost single-handedly saved the lives of countless Hungarian Jews, at unimaginable risk and great cost to himself. As a Holocaust survivor said, 'Schindler saved hundreds. Wallenberg saved tens of thousands.' This is the story of how he achieved this and of his personal duel with Adolf Eichmann, the SS colonel charged with obliterating Hungarian Jewry, who sent half a million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. This confrontation reaches its climax in 1944 when Soviet and German troops are fighting hand-to-hand through the suburbs of Budapest and Eichmann's push for the Final Solution is personally opposed by Wallenberg. The book also sheds new light on Wallenberg's fate - he disappeared into the Soviet Union after the war to a highly controversial and disputed death. (The Americans were so determined to discover what happened to him that they made him an honorary citizen in order to prise information out of the Russians.) It's an inspiring story which moves at the pace of a master thriller-writer, but the truth behind it is heartbreaking.

To Save a People

Charlie Croker

How long does the average British male spend in the shower? 
 
What is the worst-paid job? 
 
Where are the keenest DIYers in the UK to be found? 
 
Which profession least favours the wearing of ties? 
 
Why are 63% of us too embarrassed to complain about bad food in a restaurant? 
 
Covering everything from food to travel, via gardening and fashion, 8 out of 10 Brits tells you everything you need to know, and much that you don't, about who we are, where we're going, and why - on statistical grounds - we should all consider living in Southend-on-Sea.

8 out of 10 Brits

Intriguing statistics about the world's 79th largest nation

Robert Lacey

Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: it sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world, and yet the country's roiling disaffection produced sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. It is a modern state, driven by contemporary technology, and yet its powerful religious establishment would have its customs and practices rolled back to match those of the Prophet Muhammed over a thousand years ago. In a world where events in the Middle East continue to have geopolitical consequences far beyond the region's boundaries, an understanding of this complex nation is essential. 
 
With Inside the Kingdom, British journalist and bestselling author Robert Lacey has given us one of the most penetrating and insightful looks at Saudi Arabia ever produced. More than twenty years after he first moved to the country to write about the Saudis at the end of the oil boom, Lacey has returned to find out how the consequences of the boom produced a society at war with itself. 
 
Filled with stories told by a broad range of Saudis, from high princes and ambassadors to men and women on the street, Inside the Kingdom is in many ways the story of the Saudis in their own words.

Inside the Kingdom

Tony Benn

As a diarist I have chronicled the time through which I have lived in meticulous detail: but all that is history. What matters now is the future for those who will live through it. 
 
The past is the past but there may be lessons to be learned which could help the next generation to avoid mistakes their parents and grandparents made. 
 
Certainly at my age I have learned an enormous amount from the study of history - not so much from the political leaders of the time but from those who struggled for justice and explained the world in a way that shows the continuity of history and has inspired me to do my work. 
 
Normality for any individual is what the world is like on the day they are born. The normality of the young is wholly different from the normality of their grandparents. 
 
It is the disentangling of the real questions from the day to day business of politics that may make sense for those who take up the task as they will do. 
 
Every generation has to fight the same battles as their ancestors had to fight, again and again, for there is no final victory and no final defeat. Two flames have burned from the beginning of time - the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope. If this book serves its purpose it will fan both flames.

Letters To My Grandchildren

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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