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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. E. W. Mason

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

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Frances Spalding

'The best of these Darwins is that they are cut out of rock - three taps is enough to convince one how immense is their solidarity.' So wrote Virginia Woolf affectionately of Gwen Raverat, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin. 
 
In this first full biography, Frances Spalding looks beyond the artist Gwen Raverat's childhood memoir; Period Piece, and creates a fascinating and moving portrait of Charles Darwin's granddaughter. She explores her Darwin inheritance; her conflicts when she moves beyond her home environment to enter the Slade School of Art; her encounter with post-Impressionism; and her friendships with Stanley Spencer, Rupert Brooke and members of the Bloomsbury set. At each stage, Gwen's artistic creativity is interwoven with her relationships and circumstances. She helps revive the medium of wood-engraving and with her husband, Jacques Raverat, celebrates the South of France in the art they produce while living in Venice. 
 
Drawing on a huge cache of unpublished papers, Spalding brings us a life lived with bravery, humour; realism and integrity, surrounded by a remarkable cast of relatives, friends and associates.

Gwen Raverat

Friends, Family and Affections

Michael Levey

In this evocative memoir Michael Levey recreates a between-the-wars English childhood outwardly ordinary and undramatic, but inwardly rich, stirring, sometimes bewildering, and altogether far from typical, not least in its pervasive Catholic ethos. An only child, intensely self-aware, devout, yet questioning, as well as imaginative, drawn to Shakespeare and the theatre, and to all things visual, he grew up in Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast.  He attended a succession of Catholic schools, before joining the Army at the very end of the War.  Notably entertaining is his account of service life, spent partly in Egypt, as is the final chapter, which finds him arriving at the National Gallery in London, to begin a career that would culminate in his being appointed Director.With its precise evocation of a child's relationship with the world around him and with his parents - a couple united in reticent affection and intelligence, but totally opposed in temperament - The Chapel is on Fire will surely become a classic in the literature of childhood.

The Chapel is on Fire

Geoffrey Lewis

This is the authorized life of one of the most powerful and controversial Tory politicians of the post-war era. Lord Hailsham - statesman, orator, writer, Christian and patriot - had earned Mrs Thatcher's tribute, when he finally retired in 1987, that there were few people in public life who had provided such service to his country over a span of forty years. 
 
As Quintin Hogg, Hailsham started his public career in the famous Oxford by-election of 1938. He joined the government just before the Suez crisis in 1956 and remained a strong presence in every Tory goverment until his retirement, holding a varitety of important posts, including Party Chairman when he famously rang the bell to toll the death of the Labour Party. The extraordinary drama of the 1963 succession to Macmillan is comprehensively revealed in this book, as is Hailsham`s highly influential career in the law, where he was Lord Chancellor for twelve years after 1970.

Lord Hailsham

A Life

Bernard Donoughue

Early in 1974, Bernard Donoughue, a young academic at the London School of Economics, was invited by Harold Wilson first to help fight the General Election and then to found and run the Policy Unit at Number Ten Downing Street, a body independent of the Civil Service machine working solely for the Prime Minister. He thus joined Wilson's notorious 'kitchen cabinet' with Joe Haines, Wilson's combative press secretary, and Marcia Williams, Wilson's personal and private secretary. 
 
Donoughue remained in Downing Street throughout Wilson's final premiership and was at the centre of events during this crucial period of history. His diary, kept every day, provides an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Harold Wilson, struggling to hold the Labour Party together, drinking heavily, increasingly paranoid about 'plots' and the press, and apparently in thrall to Marcia Williams. Williams had an extraordinary hold over the Prime Minister and violently resented 'intrusion' from any other advisors, Donoughue included. Though the story of Wilson's 'kitchen cabinet' has been told before, there has never been an account as intimate and explosive as this remarkable diary.

Downing Street Diary

With Harold Wilson in No. 10

David J Bercuson

Holger H Herwig

Late in the morning of 27 May 1941, the German battleship Bismarck was sunk by an overwhelming British armada in a fierce battle that lasted ninety minutes. Admiral Gunther Lutjens, Captain Ernst Lindemann and 2,206 men of her crew were lost, only 115 survived. 
 
Five days earlier, an RAF reconnaissance plane flying low off the coast of Norway spotted four large warships in the sea below. At 19,000 tons fully loaded, the sight of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen was shocking enough; even more so was the sight of the 50,000 ton battleship Bismarck - the pride of the German navy - a ship shrouded in myth, an awesome and mysterious behemoth of destruction. Their purpose in these waters was obvious and chilling: the German navy was sending this powerful four-battleship task force to seize control of the North Atlantic sea lanes. 
 
The survival of free Britain was at stake. With almost all of Europe under Hitler's thumb, and the United States still frustratingly neutral, Britain was left alone to fight Nazi Germany. The only hope lay in the convoy route across the North Atlantic from the United States. The fate of Britain and the United States hung in the balance, and all knew that the destruction of the Bismarck would be a dramatic turning point in the war. 
 
Noted historians Bercuson and Herwig have uncovered much new information on the Bismarck, including a close examination of classified British and United States diplomatic files, only recently opened, revealing secret diplomatic manoeuvrings between Churchill and Roosevelt. They tell the full story of the Bismarck for the first time, from the key strategic decisions of the national leaders, to the gripping hour-by-hour account of the battle. This is the definitive account of one of the most dramatic and momentous events of the Second World War.

Bismarck

The Story Behind the Destruction of the Pride of Hitler’s Navy

Russell Miller

Compiled from interviews, diaries, letters and contemporaneous first-person accounts - many never before published - this oral history follows the adventures of the courageous men and women who volunteered for service with Britain's Special Operations Executives and the United States' Office of Strategic Services. They parachuted behind enemy lines, often alone, with orders to cause mayhem. Arrest almost always resulted in torture and emprisonment; sometimes in execution. In occupied France, equipped with false identities, they played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo; in the Balkans they discovered that the fiery politics of the region were as dangerous as the enemy; in the Burmese jungle they led native marauders in surprise attacks against the Japanese. Supported by a team of back-room boffins who dreamed up ingenious devices like exploding rats and invisible ink, the special agents of World War Two really were a breed apart. This is their extraordinary story, in their own words.

Behind The Lines

The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II

John Campbell

The son of a carpenter, Edward Heath broke the patrician mould of Tory leaders. He pioneered free enterprise Conservatism ahead of Thatcher. He committed Britain to Europe. With accomplishments outside politics - in music and international sailing - he is the most multi-talented Prime Minister this century. Yet his period in office, which began with such high hopes in June 1970, collapsed in chaos and humiliation after only three-and-a-half years. 
 
In this powerful, bestselling biography, John Campbell shows us a nation undergoing a social and psychological revolution and, at its centre, a man of vision and integrity whose legacy will shape British history for decades to come.

Edward Heath

A Biography

D R Thorpe

Great-grandson of a crofter and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) was both complex as a person and influential as a politican. Marked by terrible experiences in the trenches in the First World War and by his work as an MP during the Depression, he was a Tory rebel - an outspoken backbencher, opposing the economic policies of the 1930s and the appeasement policies of his own government. 
 
Churchill gave him responsibility during the Second World War with executive command as 'Viceroy of the Mediterranean'. After the War, in opposition, Macmillan was one of the principal reformers of the Conservatives, and after 1951, back in government, served in several important posts before becoming Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis. 
 
Supermac examines key events including the controversy over the Cossacks repatriation, the Suez Crisis, You've Never Had It So Good, the Winds of Change, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo Scandal. The culmination of thirty-five years of research into this period by one of our most respected historians, this book gives an unforgettable portrait of a turbulent age. 
 
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

Supermac

The Life of Harold Macmillan

Stephen Anderton

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and it is a tribute to his vision and achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable and revealing book - the first biography of Christo - is also the story of Dixter from 1910 to 2006, a unique unbroken history of one English house and one English garden spanning a century. 
 
It was Christo's father, Nathaniel, who bought the medieval manor at Dixter and called in the fashionable Edwardian architect, Lutyens, to rebuild the house and lay out the garden. And it was his mother, Daisy, who made the first wild garden in the meadows there. Christo was born at Dixter in 1921. Apart from boarding school, war service and a period at horticultural college, he spent his whole life there, constantly re-planting and enriching the garden, while turning out landmark books and exhaustive journalism. Opinionated, argumentative and gloriously eccentric, he changed the face of English gardening through his passions for meadow gardening, dazzling colours and thorough husbandry. 
 
As the baby of a family of six - five boys and a girl - Christo was stifled by his adoring mother. Music-loving and sports-hating, he knew the Latin names of plants before he was eight. This fascinating book reveals what made Christo tick by examining his relationships with his generous but scheming mother, his like-minded friends (such as gardeners Anna Pavord and Beth Chatto) and his colleagues (including his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, a plantsman in Christo's own mould).

Christopher Lloyd

His Life at Great Dixter

Anthony Read

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Western leaders drafted a peace treaty that would punish German militarism and 'make the world safe for democracy' but the world itself was already fighting a new war, against terrorism. The great evil was now Bolshevism, which had burst onto the scene in 1917 and rapidly seared itself into the world's consciousness. 
 
The Allied powers' attempts to destroy this threatening ideology at its source by intervening in the Russian civil war were both unsuccessful and controversial and the tremors of the Russian upheaval eighteen months earlier were being felt throughout the world, resurfacing in bloody revolutions and even bloodier counter-revolutions in Germany, Hungary and the Baltic States, as well as in the massive strikes, riots and civil unrest that paralyzed the rest of the world. 
 
Military revolts involving thousands of British personnel saw a group of sailors imprisoned for taking over their ship, hauling down the white ensign and hoisting the red flag in its place, while in Ireland Michael Collins and the IRA were conducting a successful terrorist campaign against the British; in Italy Benito Mussolini deserted the socialist camp and drew up the Fascist Manifesto; and in the United States a series of terrorist bombings, later labelled the Great Red Scare, created a wave of hysteria that shook the very foundations of a free and democratic society. 
 
Anthony Read's absorbing and revelatory book chronicles and examines the running battle with Bolshevism, insurgency and fear during the most revolutionary year since 1789.

The World On Fire

1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism

Amity Shlaes

Challenging conventional history, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression that devastated America in the early part of the twentieth century. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great by forgetting the men and women who sought to help themselves. 
 
In this illuminating work of history, Shlaes follows the struggles of those now forgotten people, from a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal, to Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, and Father Divine, a black cult leader. She takes a fresh look at the great scapegoats of the period, from Andrew Mellon to Sam Insull of Chicago. Finally, she traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves. Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man reveals how those dark years shaped both current political challenges and the strong national character that helps Americans to confront them.

The Forgotten Man

A New History of the Great Depression

Ladislaus Löb

Two months after his eleventh birthday, on 9 July 1944, the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp closed behind Ladislaus Löb. Five months later, with the Second World War still raging, he crossed the border into Switzerland, cold and hungry, but alive and safe. He was not alone, but part of a group of some 1,670 Jewish men, women and children from Hungary, who had been rescued from the Nazis as a result of a deal made by a man called Rezso Kasztner - himself a Hungarian Jew - with Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust. Twelve years and a miscarriage of justice later Kasztner was murdered by an extremist Jewish gang in his adopted home of Israel. 
 
To this day he remains a highly controversial figure, regarded by some as a traitor and by many others as a hero. He was accused of betraying the bulk of the Hungarian Jewry by hand-picking only those who were politically and personally dear to him, or those from whom he could benefit financially, and the judge of his post-war trial concluded that he had 'sold his soul to Satan'. 
 
Rezso Kasztner tells his story - and also the story of a child who lived to grow up after the Holocaust thanks to him. A compelling combination of history and memoir, it is also an examination of one individual's unique achievement and a consideration of the profound moral issues raised by his dealings with some of the most evil men ever known.

Rezso Kasztner

The Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews: A Survivor's Account

John Richardson

From 1950 to 1962, John Richardson lived near Picasso in France and was a friend of the artist. With a view to writing a biography, the acclaimed art historian kept a diary of their meetings. After Picasso's death, his widow Jacqueline collaborated in the preparation of this work, giving Richardson access to Picasso's studio and papers. 
 
Volume one of this extraordinary biography establishes the complexity of Picasso's Spanish roots; his aversion to his native Malaga and his passion for Barcelona and Catalan "modernisme". Richardson introduces new material on the artist's early training in religious art; re-examines old legends to provide fresh insights into the artistic failures of Picasso's father as an impetus to his sons's triumphs; and includes portraits of Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein, who made up "The Picasso Gang" in Paris during the "Blue" and "Rose" periods.

A Life of Picasso Volume I

1881-1906

John Richardson draws on the same combination of lively writing, critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and personal experience which made a bestseller out of the first volume and vividly recreates the artist's life and work during the crucial decade of 1907-17 - a period during which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism and to that extent engendered modernism. 
 
Richardson has had unique access to untapped sources and unpublished material. By harnessing biography to art history, he has managed to crack the code of cubism more successfully than any of his predecessors. And by bringing a fresh light to bear on the artist's often too sensationalised private life, he has succeeded in coming up with a totally new view of this paradoxical man of his paradoxical work. Never before has Picasso's prodigious technique, his incisive vision and not least his sardonic humour been analysed with such clarity.

A Life of Picasso Volume II

1907 1917: The Painter of Modern Life

Margarete Buber-Neumann

This book is a unique account by a survivor of both the Soviet and Nazi concentration camps: its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was a loyal member of the German Communist party. From 1935 she and her second husband, Heinz Neumann, were political refugees in Moscow. In April 1937 Neumann was arrested by the secret police, and executed by the end of the year. She herself was arrested in 1938. 
 
In Under Two Dictators Buber-Neumann describes the two years of suffering she endured in the Soviet prisons and in the huge Central-Asian concentration and slave labour camp of Karaganda; her extradition to the Gestapo in 1940 at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Friendship Pact; and her five years of suffering in the Nazi concentration and death camp for women, Ravensbrück. Her story displays extraordinary powers of observation and of memory as she describes her own fate, as well as those of hundreds of fellow prisoners. She explores the behaviour of the guards, supervisors, police and secret police and compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler's methods of dictatorship and terror. 
 
First published in Swedish, German and English and subsequently translated and published in a further nine languages, Under Two Dictators is harrowing in its depiction of life under the rule of two of the most brutal regimes the western world has ever seen but also an inspiring story of survival, of ideology and of strength and a clarion call for the protection of democracy.

Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler

With an introduction by Nikolaus Wachsmann

Bryan Magee

This utterely compelling memoir opens with a sceptical nine-year-old Bryan Magee being taught the facts of life. It goes on to tell the story of the Second World War as seen through a child's eyes. 
 
Growing Up in a War nostalgically evokes the atmostphere of wartime England, the community spirit of a society before television, where very few had cars or telephones. A kid from the East End, he won a scholarship to one of the country's ancient public schools. During the school holidays, he returned to London and the air raids, the doodlebugs and V2 rockets. 
 
With the war over, Bryan's school sent him to a Lycée in Versailles, and he explored the Paris of those post-war years. Then, back in England, he tumbled into his first love affair. The book comes to an end with his call-up into the army, and his unexpected posting to the School of Military Intelligence. 
 
Growing Up in a War is a stunning autobiography and account of Britain during an extraordinary period of history, by the winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography.

Growing Up In A War

Richard Holmes

The retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons in the early months of the First World War is one of the great dramas of European history. Blending his recreation of the military campaign with contemporary testimony and an account of his own ride over the route, Richard Holmes takes the reader on a unique journey - to glimpse the summer the old world ended.

Riding The Retreat

Mons to the Marne 1914 Revisited

Gillian Tindall

Just across the River Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare’s Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London’s marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements – and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air. 
 
Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house – the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London’s numberless poor. In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others and for a whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London’s history.

The House By The Thames

And The People Who Lived There

Vasily Grossman

In the summer of 1941, as the Germans invade Russia, newspaper reporter Vasily Grossman is swept to the frontlines, witnessing some of the most savage atrocities in Russian history. 
 
 As Grossman follows the Red Army from the defence of Moscow, to the carnage at Stalingrad, to the Nazi genocide in Treblinka, his writings paint a vividly raw and devastating account of Operation Barbarossa during World War Two. 
Grossman’s notebooks, war diaries, personal correspondence and newspaper articles are meticulously woven into a gripping narrative and provide a piercing look into the life of the author behind recent Sunday Times bestseller Stalingrad. 
 
A Writer at War stands as an unforgettable eyewitness account of the Eastern Front and places Grossman as the leading Soviet voice of ‘the ruthless truth of war’. 
 
‘A remarkable addition to the literature of 1941 – 1945...a wonderful portrait of the wartime experience of Russia... A worthy memorial to a remarkable man’ Sunday Telegraph

A Writer At War

Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945

Richard Overy

'Outstanding...Overy has written a masterpiece of analytical history, posing and answering one of the great questions of the century' Niall Ferguson, Sunday Times 
 
The Allied victory in 1945 – though comprehensive – was far from inevitable. By 1942 almost the entire resources of continental Europe were in German hands and Japan had wiped out the western colonial presence in Asia. Democracy appeared to have had its day. 
 
 In this remarkable study, Richard Overy provides a reinterpretation of the war through an account of the decisive military campaigns that created the astonishing revival in Allied fortunes. He also explores the deeper factors that determined success and failure: industrial stength, fighting ability, the skills of leaders and the moral contrasts between the two sides. 
 
 Today the modern world is once more in the throes of painful transformation. It is essential to establish why and how the last great war was won. Richard Overy casts a brilliant light on the most important turning-point of the modern age. 
 
‘A compelling analysis...skilful and chilling’ The Economist

Why The Allies Won

Nicholas Stargardt

Witnesses of War is the first work to show how children experienced the Second World War under the Nazis. Children were often the victims in this most terrible of European conflicts, falling prey to bombing, mechanised warfare, starvation policies, mass flight and genocide. But children also became active participants, going out to smuggle food, ply the black market, and care for sick parents and siblings. As they absorbed the brutal new realities of German occupation, Polish boys played at being Gestapo interrogators, and Jewish children at being ghetto guards or the SS. Within days of Germany's own surrender, German children were playing at being Russian soldiers. As they imagined themselves in the roles of their all-powerful enemies, children expressed their hopes and fears, as well as their humiliation and envy. 
 
This is the first account of the Second World War which brings together the opposing perspectives and contrasting experiences of those drawn into the new colonial empire of the Third Reich. German and Jewish, Polish and Czech, Sinti and disabled children were all to be separated along racial lines, between those fit to rule and those destined to serve; ultimately between those who were to live and those who were to die. 
 
Because the Nazis measured their success in terms of Germany's racial future, children lay at the heart of their war. Drawing on a wide range of new sources, from welfare and medical files to private diaries, letters and pictures, Nicholas Stargardt evokes the individual voices of children under Nazi rule. By bringing their experiences of the war together for the first time, he offers a fresh and challenging interpretation of the Nazi social order as a whole.

Witnesses Of War

Children's Lives Under the Nazis

Ben Shephard

When British troops entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, they uncovered scenes of horror and depravity that shocked the world. But they also confronted a terrible challenge - inside the camp were some 60,000 people, suffering from typhus, starvation and dysentery, who would die unless they received immediate medical attention. 
 
After Daybreak is the story of the army stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers, medical students and relief workers who attempted to save the inmates of Belsen - with the war still raging and only the most primitive drugs and facilities available. 
 
Drawing on their diaries and letters, Ben Shephard reconstructs events at Belsen in the spring of 1945 - from the first horror of its discovery, through the agonising process of trying to save the survivors. In doing so he addresses the question of whether we should regard the relief of the camp as an epic of medical heroism - as the British believed - or see the failure to plan for Belsen and the undoubted mistakes that were made there as further evidence of Allied indifference to the fate of Europe's Jews - as some historians now argue. The result is a powerful and dramatic narrative, full of extraordinary incidents and characters, and an important contribution to medical history.

After Daybreak

The Liberation of Belsen, 1945

Martin Pugh

Britain is celebrated for having avoided the extremism, political violence and instability that blighted many European countries between the two world wars. But her success was a closer thing than has been realized. Disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, outbreaks of fascist violence and fears of communist subversion in industry and the Empire ran through the entire period. 
 
Fascist organizations may have failed to attract the support they achieved elsewhere but fascist ideas were adopted from top to bottom of society and by men and women in all parts of the country. This book will demonstrate for the first time the true spread and depth of fascist beliefs - and the extent to which they were distinctly British. 
 
Rich in anecdotes and extraordinary characters, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! shows us an inter-war Britain on the high-road to fascism but never quite arriving at its destination.

Hurrah For The Blackshirts!

Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars

Jeremy A Crang

Paul Addison

On the night of 13 and 14 February 1945 the RAF bombed the city of Dresden, causing devastating fires which obliterated the historic city centre and killed many thousands of people. Sixty years later these raids remain one of the most notorious, and also one of the most controversial, episodes in the history of the Second World War. 
 
Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden 1945 assembles a cast of distinguished scholars, including Sebastian Cox, David Bloxham, Nicola Lambourne, Soenke Neitzel, Richard Overy and Hew Strachan, to review the origins, conduct, and consequences of the raids. Each contributor writes from his or her own perspective, offering the reader a panoramic reassessment of the evidence and the issues, including the question of whether or not the bombing of the city constitutes a war crime. 
 
Firestorm cogently demonstrates the reasons why Dresden has come to symbolise the military and ethical questions involved in the waging of total war.

Firestorm

The Bombing of Dresden 1945

A wealthy lawyer, debonair ladies' man, consummate actor, and courageous gambler, Dusko Popov played the role of playboy amongst the top echelons of British society to become one of Germany's most trusted spies. In fact, he was one of Britain's most successful double agents, and, some say, the inspiration for James Bond. With full access to FBI and MI5 records, along with private family papers, his incredible adventures can now be told authoritatively for the first time. 
 
Recruited by the Abwehr in 1940, 27-year-old Popov immediately offered his services to the British. His code-name was Tricycle. Throughout the war he fed the Germans with a constant stream of military 'intelligence', all vetted by MI5, and came to be viewed as their most important and reliable agent in Britain. But when he was ordered by the Abwehr to the United States to report on the defences at Pearl Harbor, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, failed to heed his warnings, distrusting all spies and detesting Popov in particular, whom he considered to be 'a moral degenerate'. 
 
Facing the danger of exposure, arrest and execution on a daily basis, Tricycle went on to build up a network known as the Yugoslav Ring, which not only delivered a stream of false information to Berlin but also supplied vital intelligence to the Allies on German rocketry, strategy and security. After the war Dusko Popov was granted British citizenship and awarded an OBE. The presentation was made, appropriately, in the cocktail bar at the Ritz.

Codename Tricycle

The true story of the Second World War's most extraordinary double agent

Niall Barr

In late June 1942, the dispirited and defeated British Eighth Army was pouring back towards the tiny railway halt of El Alamein in the western desert of Egypt. Tobruk had fallen and Eighth Army had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Rommel's Panzerarmee Afrika. Yet just five months later, the famous bombardment opened the Eighth Army's own offensive which destroyed the Axis threat to Egypt. Explanations for the remarkable change of fortune have generally been sought in the abrasive personality of the new army commander Lieutenant-General Bernard Law Montgomery. But the long running controversies surrounding the commanders of Eighth Army - Generals Auchinleck and Montgomery - and that of their legendary opponent, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, have often been allowed to obscure the true nature of the Alamein campaign. Pendulum of War provides a vivid and fresh perspective on the fighting at El Alamein from the early desperate days of July to the final costly victory in November.

Pendulum Of War

Three Battles at El Alamein

W J McCormack

In June 1934, W. B. Yeats gratefully received the award of a Goethe-Plakette from Oberburgermeister Krebs, four months after his early play The Countess Cathleen had been produced in Frankfurt by SS Untersturmfuhrer Bethge. Four years later, the poet publicly commended Nazi legislation before leaving Dublin to die in southern France. These hitherto neglected, isolated and scandalous details stand at the heart of this reflective study of Yeats's life, his attitudes towards death, and his politics. 
 
Blood Kindred identifies an obsession with family as the link connecting Yeats's late engagement with fascism to his Irish Victorian origins in suburban Dublin and industrializing Ulster. It carefully documents and analyses his involvement with both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult, his secretive consultations with Irish army officers during his Senate years, his incidental anti-Semitism, and his approval of the right-wing royalist group L'Action Française in the 1920s. 
 
The familiar peaks and troughs of Irish history, such as the 1916 Rising and the death of Parnell, are re-oriented within a radical new interpretation of Yeats's life and thought, his poetry and plays. As far as possible Bill McCormack lets Yeats speak for himself through generous quotation from his newly accessible correspondence. The result is a combative, entertaining biography which allows Ireland's greatest literary figure to be seen in the round for the first time.

Blood Kindred

W. B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics

Bela Zsolt

Originally published in weekly instalments, Nine Suitcases is the Hungarian writer Béla Zsolt's harrowing memoir of his experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvarad and as a forced labourer in the Ukraine. Written with exceptional freshness and a devastating blend of angry despair and cool detachment, Zsolt - one of the earliest writers on the Holocaust - provides not only a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but a shocking exposure of the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice and betrayal of which human beings - the victims no less than the perpetrators - are capable in extreme circumstances. Interspersed with moments of grotesque farce, grim irony and occasional memories of human kindness, Zsolt's nightmarish but meticulously realistic chronicle of smaller and larger crimes against humanity is as riveting as it is horrifying.

Nine Suitcases

The Nazi regime was essentially a religious cult, relying on the hypnotic personality of one man, Adolf Hitler, and it was fated to die with him. But while it lasted, his closest lieutenants competed ferociously for power and position as his chosen successor. This deadly contest accounted for many of the regime's worst excesses, in which millions of people died, and which brought Western civilization to its knees. The Devil's Disciples is the first major book for a general readership to examine those lieutenants, not only as individuals but also as a group. It focuses on the three Nazi paladins closest to Hitler - Goring, Goebbels and Himmler - with their nearest rivals - Bormann, Speer and Ribbentrop in close attendance. Others who were removed in various ways - like Gregor Strasser, Ernst R-hm, Heydrich and Hess - play supporting roles. Perceptive and illuminating, The Devil's Disciples is above all a powerful chronological narrative, showing how the personalities of Hitler's inner circle developed and how their jealousies and constant intrigues affected the regime, the war, and Hitler himself.

The Devil's Disciples

John Keegan

In Battle at Sea, Sir John Keegan applies to maritime warfare the technique that he put to such brilliant effect in his classic of war on land, The Face of Battle. He concentrates on four key conflicts: Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway and the Battle of the Atlantic. He takes us into the very heart of the fighting while providing a remarkable panoramic view of naval warfare through the centuries.

Battle At Sea

From Man-of-War to Submarine

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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