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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

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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A remarkable collection of 'Covid Chronicles' -- stories from lockdown sent in from listeners to BBC Radio 4 -- making a deeply moving people's history of the pandemic. 
 
 
On 23 March 2020, as the deadly virus spread around the world, the UK went into lockdown. In the following weeks and months, it became clear that in many ways we were all in this together, but the illness and the long period of isolation would hit people in entirely different ways. 
 
When BBC Radio 4's PM Programme launched the 'Covid Chronicles' series, listeners from across the country - and beyond - began sending in their lockdown stories to be aired on the show. The results are astonishing: moving, profound, funny, powerful and an invaluable record of our collective experiences. Ranging from the everyday (the thrill of booking a food delivery) to the momentous (a wedding on Zoom), we hear about birth and death, loneliness and loss, community and kindness, as well as remarkable stories from those working in the NHS on the front line. 
 
This book is a collection of some of these Chronicles, written in the midst of one of the most unexpected and intense moments in our history. Together they give us an unforgettable portrait of ordinary people caught in extraordinary times, with all the humour and tragedy and uncertainty we've been through. 
 
 'It's inspiring that so many people have shared their stories - some everyday, some life-changing, but all very human. This is a wonderful collection of experiences, to record and remember this devastating year' Christie Watson, bestselling author of The Language of Kindness

Letters from Lockdown

A Selection of Covid Chronicles from BBC Radio 4’s PM Programme

Cecil Beaton

At the beginning of the Second World War the Ministry of Information, through the advice of Kenneth Clark, commissioned Cecil Beaton to photograph the Home Front. Beaton set to work recording the destruction of the Wren churches in the City and the heroism of Londoners under attack. He conducted a survey of Bomber and Fighter Commands for the RAF, which was published with Beaton's own astute commentary. Beaton was an effective propagandist, but his voice, like his photographs, was touchingly elegant. Whatever his subject, Beaton was always a stylist. 
 
Beaton's wartime work for the Ministry amounted to seven thousand photographs, which are now housed with their negatives at the Imperial War Museums. They form a great document both of the landscape of war and of the passing of the Empire. He travelled through the Western Desert and on to Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan and Syria. In 1943 he left for India where he photographed the final days of the Raj in New Delhi and Calcutta before joining the Burma campaign. He ended the war deep in Chinese territory where he witnessed the Nationalist resistance to the Japanese. 
 
Beaton's inherent sense of theatre extended from palatial drawing rooms to the jungle and the desert. Whatever the circumstances he never departed from his radical aesthetic. Theatre of War is published in conjunction with the Imperial War Museums on the occasion of a major exhibition.

Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War

Nik Cohn

What lunacy would cause a 55-year-old white male to embroil himself in the world of New Orleans rap - as ideas man, talent-spotter, lyricist, and would-be producer? Nik Cohn has loved (and hated) hip-hop since its birth and loved (and hated) New Orleans for even longer - an addiction he's never wanted to kick. But nothing prepared him for the experience of being pitched, more or less by accident, into the role of Triksta, rap impresario. 
 
A white alien in a black world, with no funding or qualifications, and not a clue what he was doing, he had to rethink himself from scratch. Surrounded by a cast that included such names as Choppa and Soulja Slim, Big Ramp and Lil T, Bass Heavy, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Shorty Brown Hustle, he entered a world of tiny backstreet studios, broken-down slums and gun turfs. 
 
Triksta is the story of a three-year odyssey to the heart of rap, and New Orleans, and self-knowledge.

Triksta

Life and Death and New Orleans Rap

Margaret Forster

23 February 
Results rolling in! Algebra, 6th = 74%. Not bad. Latin = 55% Thrilled! History top = 85% smashing! Geography, disgusting, 2nd = 67%. 
 
In 1954 in Carlisle lived an ordinary 15-year-old schoolgirl called Margaret. She would go on to become an acclaimed writer, the author of the novels Georgy Girl and Diary of an Ordinary Woman as well as biographies and memoirs. But this is her diary from that year; her life. Hers might be a lost world, but her daily observations bring it back in vivid, irresistible detail. 
 
7 May 
Wonderful feat accomplished yesterday by Roger Bannister! At last, the 4 minute mile. Glad an Englishman got it before anyone else. 
 
24 July 
Bought a pair of shorts – white, very short with two pockets. Super but rather daring! 
 
2 September 
Mum’s coming back on Saturday. Miss her every minute! I'll never marry and have a family -- housekeeping for two for a week is bad enough -- but for life!

Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl

Anna Pallai

'Spaghetti in aspic, anyone? Revel in astonishing dishes from yesteryear: Stuffed Cocktail Grapes, Savoury Sausage Salad, a spunky Shrimp-Salmon Mould and so much more. 
 
Anna Pallai was brought up on 1970s stalwarts of stuffed peppers, meatloaf and platters of slightly greying hardboiled eggs. When she rediscovered her mother's grease-stained 70s cookbooks, she knew she needed to share them with the world, and so the hit Twitter account @70s_Party was born. 
 
Harking back to a simpler pre-Instagram, pre-clean-eating era, when the only concern for your dinner party was whether your aspic would set in time, this is a joyful celebration of food that can give you gout just by looking at it. Covering all the essentials, from starters through to desserts, dinner party etiquette (just how does one start to eat a swan fashioned from a hardboiled egg?) and the dreaded 'foreign' food, there's no potato-fashioned-as-a-stone left unturned.

70s Dinner Party

The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly of Retro Food

Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literary, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. In this vivid first volume of autobiography he describes his origins in that milieu. Orphaned at an early age, Hoggart grew up in a working-class district of Leeds, in an intimate world of terraced back-to-backs, visits from the local Board of Guardians, clothing checks and potted-meat sandwiches. With affectionate insight he recreates the family circle - a loving grandmother, one domineering and on gentle aunt, and a bibulous, melancholy uncle - and recalls his early schooling, the friends he made and the mentors he admired. Hard-working and articulate, Hoggart did well enough at grammar school to go on to Leeds University. This volume ends as, having earned a higher degree and travelled in Nazi Germany, he prepares to leave Yorkshire, via the Army, for the world beyond. Wry, compassionate, exact, A Local Habitation is a classic recreation of working-class England between the wars.

A Local Habitation

Life and Times, Volume One 1918-40

Sarvepalli Gopal

The third and final volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru covers the last eight years of his life and Prime Ministership. It deals with his efforts to sustain economic and social advance of the Indian people and not to lose hold of the principles of his foreign policy even while relations with China deteriorated, culminating the large scale aggression in both the western and eastern sections of the long boundary between the two countries.

Jawaharlal Nehru

A Biography Volume 3 1956-1964

Kazimierz Brandys

Over the past few years innumerable books have been written about contemporary Poland; yet even the best of them have been essentially journalistic works, written by sympathetic outsiders and doomed to be quickly overtaken by events. A Warsaw Diary is a very different kind of book: subtle, profound, a work of outstanding – and permanent – literary merit by one of Poland’s foremost writers. Denounced on Polish television after the imposition of martial law as a subversive document – possession of which carried an automatic prison sentence of up to ten years – it is at once a powerful, wide-ranging personal memoir, and the first eye-witness account of the momentous events of 1978-81 to set them in their historical and political context, subtly alternating between present-day Poland and her melancholy, overshadowed history and literary or philosophical reflections on the Polish character and temperament. Whether he is discussing the role of the Church, continuing anti-Semitism, the German occupation or the Stalinist years, or describing with a novelist’s eye the drab, interminable queues in a Warsaw street or thugs breaking up the dissident ‘Flying University’, Brandys’s Diary is a unique, compelling account of the Polish spirit and the Polish dilemma.

A Warsaw Diary. 1978-1981

Roger Osborne

Detective story, social history, human drama, The Deprat Affair recreates the hothouse atmosphere of colonial Indochina in the early twentieth century. Among its cliques, its bitter rivalries, its nepotism and favours, how are we to disentangle the scientific, the moral and the legal 'truths' of the affair?   Most of all, the story centres on one compelling individual - Jacques Deprat. En route to a golden future as one of France's greatest geologists, he is suddenly accused of fraud and plunged into a desperate fight to save his reputation. Convicted of placing European fossils among samples collected in Indochina, he is dismissed from his job, and expelled from the Société Géologique de France. Thrown out of the science to which he has given everything, he re-invents himself, changes his name, and begins not one, but two fascinating new lives - each as extraordinary and colourful as the one he left behind. And even in the manner of his premature death, Deprat proved his ability to shake the world.   Eighty years on from his conviction, the truth of the Deprat affair is still in doubt - and is still passionately debated among French scientists. But innocent or guilty, Jacques Deprat is an astonishing figure, whose capacity to overcome the world's disgrace and the dissolution of his dreams makes an amazing and captivating story.

The Deprat Affair

Ruth Dudley Edwards

They were 'Cudlipp' and 'Mr King' when they met in 1935. At 21, gregarious, extrovert and irreverent Hugh Cudlipp had many years of journalistic experience: at 34, shy, introspective and solemn Cecil Harmsworth King, haunted by the ghost of Uncle Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, the great press magnate, and bitter towards Uncle Harold, Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, was fighting his way up in the family business. 
 
Opposites in most respects, they were complementary in talents and had in common a deep concern for the underdog. Cudlipp, the journalistic genius, and King, the formidable intellect, were to become, in Cudlipp's words, 'the Barnum and Bailey' of Fleet Street. Together, on the foundation of the populist Daily Mirror, they created the biggest publishing empire in the world. 
 
Yet their relationship foundered sensationally in 1968, when - as King tried to topple the Prime Minister - Cudlipp toppled King. Through the story of two extraordinary men, Ruth Dudley Edwards gives us a riveting portrait of Fleet Street in its heyday.

Newspapermen

Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street

Matthew Hart

Vermeer, Goya, Rembrandt, Rubens - the Beit art collection was worth millions. For decades Sir Alfred and Lady Beit had lived peacefully at Russborough House in Ireland. Until people started stealing their paintings...Of all the canvases at Russborough, it was Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid that most caught the public's imagination. Twice stolen, once by an IRA sympathiser and then by notorious gangster Martin Cahill, it risked being lost from view forever, unless the Garda, together with Scotland Yard and some seasoned international art detectives, could contrive the perfect sting... 
 
Matthew Hart tells the riveting story of the theft and recovery of some of the world's most important art, finding new leads and unexpected connections in the mysterious underworld of international art crime.

The Irish Game

A True Story of Art and Crime

Rich Cohen

Whether you know him as El Amigo, the Banana Man, the Gringo, or simply Z - whether you even know him at all - Sam Zemurray lived one of the greatest untold American stories of the last hundred years. 
 
A tough, uneducated Russian Jew who found himself and his fortune in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Zemurray built a fruit-selling empire hustling rotting fruit to market to eke out the slimmest profit, to eventually become a backchannel kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary. The Fish That Ate the Whale spans the transition from Old-World business to New-: from privateer adventurers seeking fortunes in remote frontiers, to buccaneers of high finance and wars fought with media, no-bid contracts, and necessary illusions. 
 
Part of what makes this book so remarkable - and its dubious hero so compelling - is the almost invisible ease with which Cohen's threads intertwine to create a larger pattern that seems so obvious once you step back to see it. Z's story spans the birth of modern foreign relations, the creation of the CIA, smuggling dispossessed Jews out of Europe, the invention of Israel, corporate espionage, the Bay of Pigs, political assassination, and the unspoken motives of the Cold War. It is a twentieth-century epic, and standing at its core is a man unlike any we've seen before or since, who, for good or ill, looked at what was, but saw only what was possible.

The Fish that Ate the Whale

The Life and Times of America's Banana King

Various

In 1888, Whitechapel - at the heart of the inner East End - was the most (in)famous place in the country, widely imagined as a site of the blackest and deepest horror. Its streets and alleys were seen as violent and dangerous, overflowing with poverty and depravity. This book aims to uncover the reality of East End life. Sections look at slum housing, immigration, attitudes to women, poverty, violence and crime. The book examines how the brutal killings were reported and how the police tried to identify the murderer. A final section shows how Jack the Ripper has shaped our vision of London, and influenced our popular culture. 
 
Jack the Ripper and the East End coincides with an exhibition organised by the Museum of London at their Museum in Docklands. Key surviving documents from the National Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives will be on display - in addition to material from the collections of the Museum of London such as photographs of the Whitechapel Mission. The illustrations for the book will include rare and unpublished photographs, sections of the 'master' Booth Map of Poverty, detectives' reports and original letters. 
 
The introduction will be written by Peter Ackroyd, who is the acknowledged expert on London, its darker aspects and how its history has seeped into its very stones. Leading historians and curators will provide additional insights. This is a book which will be valued for years to come for its enduring and important portrait of the Victorian East End.

Jack The Ripper and the East End

Introduction by Peter Ackroyd

Michael Slackman

In this extremely vivid account of the Pearl Harbor attack, Michael Slackman takes us right through the course of events. He starts by scrutinising the circumstances and decisions that prompted the attack and left the United States so unprepared, looking at Japan's objectives in South-East Asia, the political and economic developments which drew them into conflict, and at American strategic thought. 
 
The core of the book, however, concerns the events of 7 December 1941 itself, as seen through the eyes of both Japanese and American participants, Slackman recounts the experiences of these people and included stories and anecdotes from over a hundred interviews with survivors. His use of contemporary documents and firsthand personal accounts presents us with a remarkably intense and detailed telling of the attack. 
 
He goes on to examine the aftermath of Pearl Harbour and all its consequences. While it was a short-term success for the Japanese, the attack led to the end of American isolationism and changed the course of the war. 
 
With its central focus on the unfolding human drama and its succinct analyses of the events before and after the attack, Target: Pearl Harbor is an absorbing and detailed account of one of the most significant days of the Second World War.

Target

Pearl Harbor

Eva Kolinsky

After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish survivors working to rebuild their lives.  Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain.  Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place.  Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment.  And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas.  Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience.  Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.

After The Holocaust

Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945

Terry Parssinen

In September 1938, Hitler had been in power for more than five years, and had abrogated most of the constraints placed on German militarism by the Treaty of Versailles. Earlier that year he had forced Austria into his Third Reich without a single shot fired, and his sights were set on Czechoslovakia. It was in this climate that a coup was born, led by Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster of German military leaders, members of the Berlin police, local troop commanders, civil authorities, religious leaders, and a courageous group of resisters who assembled in a mission to unseat, and even kill, Hitler. 
 
The Oster Conspiracy of 1938 mines the cultural and political milieu of post-WWI Europe, the forces and personal histories that motivated the group to such decisive and dangerous action, and the catalyst of their ultimate failure. This is narrative history at its best: revelatory, well documented with archival material, people with a rich cast of characters, fast-paced, and highly provocative.

The Oster Conspiracy of 1938

The Unknown Story of the Military Plot to Kill Hitler

Adrian Fort

Archibald Wavell was born a few years before Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee and died shortly after the end of the Second World War (1883-1950). During that time the country in which he was born and brought up in changed beyond recognition, undergoing a fundamental revision in the attitudes, expectations, prejudices and hopes of the British people. His life epitomises that of a generation of famous men whose education and upbringing equipped them for a future that was to prove an illusion. 
 
At seventeen, Archibald Wavell joined the army and as a young officer saw action in the Boer War and on the North West Frontier.In the Great War, he was often close to the greatest generals in the British Army; he fought in the trenches, was decorated for bravery and lost an eye. Between the wars his career included command of troops attempting to keep the peace in Palestine as revolt engulfed the country. His victorious campaigns early in the Second World War attracted a blaze of public admiration and renown; but he also tasted defeat and rejection, both in Africa and from 1941 as commander-in-chief of Allied forces in India, wilting before the Japanese onslaught in Burma and Singapore. In 1943 he was appointed Viceroy of India, where he took on the task of guiding that country's destiny as it crossed the brink of Empire into the turmoil of independence.

Archibald Wavell

The Life and Times of an Imperial Servant

Gerard DeGroot

Before the Bomb, there were simply 'bombs', lower case. But it was the twentieth century, one hundred years of almost incredible scientific progress, that saw the birth of the Bomb, the human race's most powerful and most destructive discovery. 
 
In this magisterial and enthralling account, Gerard DeGroot gives us the life story of the Bomb, from its birth in the turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early adulthood in Nagasaki and Bikini, Australia and Siberia to unsettling maturity in test sites and missile silos all over the globe. By turns horrific, awe-inspiring and blackly comic, The Bomb is never less than compelling.

The Bomb

A Life

Piers Brendon

This astute biography brilliantly captures, in one volume, the full range of Winston Churchill's astonishing career. perhaps the greatest political figure of modern times, Churchill's achievement extended well beyond his emblematic role in the Second World War. Piers Brendon brings great wit and dozens of pungent anecdotes to this penetrating account, illuminating the 'monstrous compound' of courage and egotism, rudeness and humour, brutality and compassion that was Winston Churchill. What emerges from these pages is one of the most fascinating and colourful figures of the twentieth century. To rescue Churchill from being buried under millions of words Piers Brendon has written a brief but brilliant profile of the colossus.

Churchill

Clive Ponting

How has the world changed in the last century? As we look back across a hundred years of turbulence, Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of what the twentieth century has meant to people throughout the world. Progress and Barbarism analyses the fundamental forces of population, industry and their consequences for the environment. It traces the rise and fall of empires, the impact of nationalism, examines domestic politics from all political perspectives, and considers the darker side of history in the growing repressive power of states across the world and the most terrible of twentieth-century crimes - genocide. Progress and Barbarism is a provocative and challenging interpretation of twentieth-century history, combining a global sweep and an eye for detail and individual experiences.

Progress and Barbarism

The World in the Twentieth Century

Henry Hampton

Steve Fayer

Sarah Flynn

In this monumental volume, Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer draw upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and hundreds of ordinary people who took part in the struggle, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it.

Voices Of Freedom

An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s Through the 1980s

James Bradley

Ron Powers

In this remarkably powerful book, James Bradley takes as his starting point one of the most famous photographs of all time. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima and into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire from 22,000 Japanese. After climbing through a hellish landscape and on to the island's highest peak, six men were photographed raising the stars and stripes. One of those soldiers was the author's father, John Bradley. He never spoke to his family about the photograph or about the war, but after his death in 1994, they discovered closed boxes of letters and photos which James Bradley draws on to retrace the lives of his father and his five companions. 
 
Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island - an island riddled with sixteen miles of tunnels and defended by Japanese soldiers determined to fight to the death. In the thirty-six days of fighting, almost fifty-thousand men lost their lives. 
 
Above all a human - and personal - story, few books have captured so brilliantly or so movingly the complexity of war and its aftermath and the true meaning of heroism.

Flags Of Our Fathers

Toni Morrison

An incisive and thought-provoking collection of essays on a defining American experience, curated by the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
 
Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together thirteen essays, all written especially for this book, by distinguished academics - black and white, male and female - on one of the grimmest and most revealing moments of American history: the O J Simpson case. 
 
Together these keen analyses of a defining American moment cast a chilling gaze on the script and spectacle of the insidious tensions that rend American society, even as they ponder the proper historical, cultural, political, legal, psychological, and linguistic ramifications of the affair.

Birth Of A Nation-Hood

Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O J Simpson Case

John Keegan

Although 50 years have passed since the end of World War II, there has as yet been no definitive history of that conflict. Existing histories have raised as many questions as they answer: Did Roosevelt have foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbour? Could the Allies have invaded France before 1944? Might bombing the Auschwitz railway have impeded the course of the Holocaust? John Keegan here assesses the literature that has emerged from World War II - and the controversies it has generated - in a book that combines stunning erudition with crisp prose and highly personal discernment.

The Battle For History

Refighting World War Two

Frances Woodsford

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties when he died aged ninety-seven - yet their epistolary friendship was her lifeline. 
 
The 'Saturday Specials' as Frances dubbed them, are brilliantly-packed missives, sparked with comic genius, from post-war England. We follow her travails at the Baths (and her ghastly boss Mr Bond); the hilarious weekly Civil Defence classes as the Cold War advances; her attempts to shake off Dr Russell, an unwanted suitor; life at home with Mother, and Mac, her charming ne'er-do-well brother; and escapades in their jointly-owned car, a 1934 Ford 8 called Hesperus. 
 
Most importantly, we get to know Frances - and her deep affection for Mr Bigelow. She started to write to him as a way of thanking his daughter for the clothes and food parcels she sent. But what had begun as a good turn offered Frances the chance to escape a trying job, and to expound with elegance, wit and verve on topical subjects from home and abroad, bringing us a beady commentary on her life and times that leaps vividly from the page. Her letters to Mr Bigelow during his final illness are a tender and moving farewell, a touching conclusion to a unique record.

Dear Mr Bigelow

A Transatlantic Friendship

Tom Brokaw

In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation - America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America.  This was a generation united by common values - by duty, honour, courage, service and love of family and country. Here you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the middle of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his hometown.  You'll hear ex-President George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of his assignments was to read the mail of the enlisted men under him, to be sure no sensitive military information would be compromised.  You'll meet Trudy Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, one of the many women in this book who found fulfilling careers in the changed society as a result of the war.  And you'll meet Martha Putney, one of the first black women to serve in the newly formed WACs. In the spirit of Band of Brothers, The Greatest Generation tells the stories of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary events - individuals united by a common purpose - working, living and dying in the service of their country.

The Greatest Generation

Sandy Gall

A mix of history and current affairs, travel, reportage and anecdote, this passionate book speaks up for the Bushmen, the first people of Africa. 
 
*Featuring a preface by Prince Charles* 
 
Bushmen were hunting and gathering, painting and mining copper, thousands of years ago. They were the first people of Africa. Deadly shots with their bows and arrows, they were, in their heyday, Lords of the Desert. They fought extremely bravely for their land, and lost. Today, they have been reduced to an underclass - dispossessed, despised and degraded. Just in time - one is tempted to say, miraculously - the Mandela government saved them from extermination in South Africa. Now, in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, set aside specially for them by the British in 1961, they are making their last stand, refusing to be evicted in order to benefit mining and tourism. Sandy Gall, who is best known for his reporting of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, has taken up the cause of the Bushmen. His interest in their plight dates back to the 1950s and 1960s when he was working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters; in 1999 he visited the Central Kalahari with his daughter Michaela. 
 
His book celebrates the culture of these unique people, many of whom have an almost mystical bond with animals. He has portrayed many fascinating individuals who have been involved, for good or ill, in their tragic history and their present predicament. Here, for the first time, is the full story of the slaughter of an innocent people. The Bushmen of Southern Africa speaks not only for the Bushmen but for the native indigenous people of the world. It faces up to a shameful and bloodstained past and looks at burning current issues such as human rights and the ownership and exploitation of land.

The Bushmen of Southern Africa

Slaughter of the Innocent

Misha Glenny

In this powerful account, Misha Glenny takes us on a journey through the new world of international organised crime. He has travelled throughout the world - from Japan to China to Brazil to the USA and has spoken to countless gangsters, policemen and victims of organised crime while also exploring the ferocious consumer demand for drugs, trafficked women, illegal labour and arms across five continents. 
 
McMafia Brain Shot focuses on cybercrime in Brazil and people trafficking from China to Brazil, the UK and Europe and unpicks the nexus of crime, politics and money worldwide which have become entangled and interdependent in entirely novel forms since the 1980s. It argues that conventional policing methods are no longer appropriate to deal with a problem whose roots lie in global poverty and the ever widening divisions between rich and poor. 
 
BRAIN SHOTS: The byte-sized account of international crime and globalisation's dark side

McMafia Brain Shot

Bernard Donoughue

The first volume of Bernard Donoughue's Downing Street Diary was described by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph as 'the best account of Harold Wlson's last days'; 'the sheer scale and detail are fascinating' wrote Peter Riddell in the Times Literary Supplement. This second volume covers the three years, 1976-79, when Donoughue was Senior Policy Advisor to James Callaghan. 
 
At first Callaghan quickly established dominance over his cabinet and restored calm after the plots and scandals of the later Wilson years. His incomes policy reduced inflation and, in the teeth of opposition from the left wing, he negotiated the notorious IMF loan at the expense of eliminating some of Labour's most cherished dreams. By 1978, Callaghan, a politician of great patriotism and decency, seemed to have succeeded in steering Britain into calmer waters. But then the storm broke. Trade union militants brushed aside their mediocre leaders and launched a ferocious attack on Callaghan's pay policy, driving up inflation and demonstrating the government's impotence. In the diaries we see the prime minister and the government paralysed as the 'Winter of Discontent' began to bite and politics took to the streets. 
 
As Labour drifted to inevitable defeat in the 1979 election we see Callaghan fighting honourably. From the smoke of battle there emerges a striking new leader: Margaret Thatcher. The diaries describe vividly both the decline and final collapse of 'old' Labour and how Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity to launch her crusade to dismantle trade union power and much of the British public sector. 
 
Besides James Callaghan the chief figures in this volume of Lord Donoughue's diaries are Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Michael Foot, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Tony Benn.

Downing Street Diary Volume Two

With James Callaghan in No. 10

Lou Dubose

Jake Bernstein

The untold story of Dick Cheney: the most powerful yet most unpopular vice president in American history. 
 
Cheney's relentless rise to political prominence over three decades happened almost by stealth. Veteran reporters Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein reveal the disturbing truth about the man who successfully co-opted executive control over the U.S. government, serving as the de facto 'shadow president' in one of the most controversial White House administrations in memory. 
 
With unique access to numerous first-hand sources, this account provides startling revelations concerning the war on terror, Cheney’s relationship with the CIA and his involvement with Enron. Dubose and Bernstein explore Cheney’s ruthless manouevers and ambitious drive that consistently steered America to the right, an impact that can still be felt in American politics today. 
 
Credited by Vanity Fair as one of the key influences behind Adam McKay’s Oscar-nominated film VICE, this utterly gripping exposé chronicles the hijacking of the American presidency and illustrates the arrogance of power as never before.

Vice

Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

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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