Alan Duff

Alan Durant is the author of books for a wide age-range, from picture books such as Burger Boy, Angus Rides the Goods Train and Always and Forever to top-end teenage thrillers (Blood, Flesh and Bones). Having worked as a copywriter at Walker Books, he is now a full-time author. 
 
He's married, with three children and lives in Brighton. He does a lot of school visits throughout the UK and abroad and also runs writing workshops.

Alan Durant

Alan Edge

Alan Ereira

Alan Garner

Alan Gilbey

Alan Gordon is the founder and director of the Pain Psychology Center in California, a leading treatment facility for chronic pain sufferers that sees over 1,500 patients from around the world every year. Debilitated by chronic pain throughout his body for several years and frustrated by the lack of effective treatment, Gordon developed the ground-breaking Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) – a highly effective system of psychological techniques that rewire the brain’s neural circuits to turn off “stuck” pain signals. He is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Southern California.

Alan Gordon

Alan Grant

Born in 1926 in New York City, Alan Greenspan worked as a Juilliard-trained professional musician before studying Economics at New York University, where he earned his PhD. From 1974 to 1977, he served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a position he held until his retirement in 2006. He is the author of the bestselling The Age of Turbulence and The Map and the Territory 2.0.

Alan Greenspan

Alan H Guth

Alan Hansen was one of Britain's most respected football players and is now one of the most outspoken and popular football pundits.

Alan Hansen

Alan Harris is a Welsh playwright who has written several plays for BBC radio including The Lighthouse and The Gold Farmer. His play A Good Night Out in the Valleys launched the new National Theatre Wales in 2010 and he has also been awarded a prestigious Creative Wales Award.

Alan Harris

Alan Hill

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. His most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, was published in 2017.

Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hooper is a founder and Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Leadership Studies, 
University of Exeter, and is also a visiting Professor at Bristol Business 
School. He has been a CEO in the public sector and now consults widely on 
senior management development and the management of change.

Alan Hooper

Alan Isler was born in England in 1934, emigrating to the US at the age of 18. After serving in the US army he went on to study literature at Columbia University, and taught for much of his adult life. Isler was the author of several novels including Kraven Images, The Bacon Fancier, Clerical Errors, The Living Proof and The Prince of West End Avenue, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994. Isler died in 2010. 
 .

Alan Isler

Alan J Wilson

Alan Jenkins

Alan Johnson was born in May 1950. He is a British Labour Party politician who served as Home Secretary from June 2009 to May 2010. Before that he filled a wide variety of cabinet positions in both the Blair and Brown governments, including Health Secretary and Education Secretary. Until 20 January 2011 he was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Johnson was the Member of Parliament for Hull West and Hessle until his retirement from politics in 2017. 
 His first book, This Boy, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Orwell Prize in 2013. His second, Please Mister Postman, won the National Book Award for Autobiography of the Year in 2014. His third, The Long and Winding Road, was published in 2016 and won the Parliamentary Book Award for Best Memoir.

Alan Johnson

Alan Jones

Belfast-born twins Alan and Gary Keery love cereal. As creators of The Cereal Killer Café, the trendiest new eatery on Brick Lane, they have turned that love of the nation’s favourite comfort food into a thriving business. The opening of their first café saw extraordinary interest with press and broadcast coverage from all over the world. The café was voted best new restaurant by Hot Dinners in 2014. A second café is opening in summer 2015.

Alan Keery

Alan Langford

Alan Lerner

Alan MacDonald

Alan Macdonald

Alan Macfarlane

Alan McDonald

Alan Melville

Alan Moore

Alan Moorehead was born in Melbourne, Australia. He travelled to England in 1937 and became a renowned foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express. Writer, world traveller, biographer, essayist, journalist, Moorehead was one of the most successful writers in English of his day. During World War II he won an international reputation for his coverage of campaigns in the Middle East and Asia, the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe. He died in 1983.

Alan Moorehead

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Spike Milligan

'I had not informed my parents of my return, I wanted it to be a lovely surprise; it was, for me, they were away ...' 
 
The seventh and last volume of Spike Milligan's memoirs sees our hero returning from war and Italy ... but to what? Aside from shooting large, inaccurate guns at Germans, all he has done for five long years is blow a trumpet, tell rude jokes and write and perform sketches for the entertainment of bored and murderous soldiers - who on earth is going to pay a civilian to do more of that? From the giddy heights of Hackney Empire to a Zurich Freak Show and beyond, Spike makes his way through the backwaters of showbiz, first as band musician then as one-man wild-act and eventually in the company of a group of like-minded comedians called Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers. They decide to call themselves The Goons...

Peace Work

'Back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, "I think we've got grounds for a rent rebate."' 
 
The fifth volume of Spike Milligan's unsurpassed account of life as a Bombardier in World War Two sees our hero dispatched from the front line to psychiatric hospital and from there to a rehabilitation camp. Considered loony (and 'unfit to be killed in combat by either side'), he becomes embroiled in his own private battle with melancholy. But it is music, wit and a little help from his friends - including one Gunner Harry Secombe - that help carry him through to his first stage appearances ...

Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

Iris Jones Simantel

From the dirty streets of the East End to the Welsh countryside, will little evacuee Iris ever find somewhere to belong? 
 
Born in 1938 under threat of looming war, Iris spent her early years playing in the rubble of bombed buildings in Dagenham by day and cowering in a dusty shelter at night. But the hardships of poverty and the dreaded Blitz could not match the pain she felt at her parents' indifference. She prayed that just once her mother would hold her when the bombs rained down. But loneliness only intensified when she was evacuated. 
 
Finding the nurturing home she had always dreamt of in her adopted Welsh parents, she wonders what, when she returns to London after the war, will be waiting for her. Will she ever be able to love her philandering father, depressive mother and an angry, bullying brother? Will her family even survive? Or will she have to look farther afield for the affection she so longs for?

Far from the East End

The moving story of an evacuee's survival and search for home

Keith Lowe

In the last days of July 1943, British and American planes dropped 9,000 tons of bombs with the intention of erasing the German city from the map. The resultant firestorm burned for a month and left 40,000 civilians dead. 
 
Inferno is a searing account of terrifying destruction: of how and why the Allies dropped a hail of high-explosive and incendiary bombs; of blizzards of sparks, hurricane-force winds and 800-degree temperatures; of survivors cowering in basements or struggling along melting streets; of a city and its people near annihilated from above. 
 
Inferno is an epic story of human devastation and survival against impossible odds.

Inferno

The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943

Frederick Kempe

'A mind-shaking work of investigative history' (Wall Street Journal) 
 
Checkpoint Charlie, 27 October 1961. At 9pm on a damp night, the Cold War reaches crisis point. US and Soviet tanks face off across the East-West divide, only yards apart. One mistake, one nervous soldier, could spring the tripwire for nuclear war... 
 
Frederick Kempe's gripping book tells the story of the Cold War's most dramatic year, when Berlin became what Khrushchev called 'the most dangerous place on earth'. Kempe re-creates the war of nerves between the young, untested President Kennedy and the bombastic Soviet leader as they squared off over the future of a divided city. He interweaves this with stories of the ordinary citizens whose lives were torn apart when the Berlin Wall went up - and the world came to the brink of disaster.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khruschev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

With his lightning-quick wit, unbridled creativity and his ear for the absurd, Milligan revolutionised British comedy, leaving a legacy of influence that stretches from Monty Python's Flying Circus to the work of self-confessed acolytes such as Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry today. 
 
Throughout his life, Milligan wrote prolifically - scripts, poetry, fiction, as well as several volumes of memoir, in which he took an entirely idiosyncratic approach to the truth. In this ground-breaking work, Norma Farnes, his long-time manager, companion, counsellor and confidante, gathers together the loose threads, reads between the lines and draws on the full breadth of his writing to present his life in his own words: an autobiography - of sorts. 
From his childhood in India, through his early career as a jazz musician and sketch-show entertainer, his spells in North Africa and Italy with the Royal Artillery, to that fateful first broadcast of The Goon Show and beyond into the annals of comedy history, this is the autobiography Milligan never wrote.

Milligan's Meaning of Life

An Autobiography of Sorts

Jason Burke

From the author of Al-Qaeda, Jason Burke's The 9/11 Wars is an essential book for understanding the dangerous and unstable world of the twenty-first century. 
 
 On September 11th 2001, in a series of coordinated suicide attacks, terrorists destroyed New York's World Trade Center and a substantial portion of the Pentagon. Since the Twin Towers fell, the world has seen the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the downfall of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, bombings, battles and riots. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the 'war on terror'. 
 
 Whether reporting on the riots in France or the attack on Mumbai, suicide bombers in Iraq or British troops fighting in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, Jason Burke's The 9/11 Wars, named 2011 Book of the Year by the Daily Telegraph, Economist and Independent, tells the story of a world that changed forever when the hijacked planes flew out of the brilliant blue sky above Manhattan on September 11th. 
 
 'The best overview of the 9/11 decade so far in print' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Economist 
 
 'A magisterial history of the last decade' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Pankaj Mishra, Guardian 
 
 'At a time when there are more books out on terrorism than ever before ... this is likely to be among the best' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Potent ... journalism of a high order ... essential for understanding the past decade' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sherard Cowper-Coles, Sunday Times 
 
 Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent for the Guardian. He has reported around the world for both the Guardian and the Observer. He is the author of two other widely praised books, both published by Penguin: Al-Qaeda and On the Road to Kandahar. He lives in New Delhi.

The 9/11 Wars

David Stevenson

FINANCIAL TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR and DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
Shortlisted for the 2012 DUKE OF WESTMINSTER MEDAL FOR MILITARY LITERATURE 
 
At the end of 1917 Britain and France faced a strategic nightmare. Their great offensives against Germany had been calamitous, leaving hundreds of thousands of young men dead and wounded for negligible territorial gains. Despite America's entry into the war the US army remained tiny, the Italian army had been routed, and Russia had dropped out of the conflict. The Central Powers now dominated Central and Eastern Europe, and Germany could move over forty divisions to the Western Front. Yet only one year later, on 11 November 1918, the fighting ended in a decisive Allied victory. 
 
Stevenson's rich and compelling book retells the story of 1918, and with penetrating original research goes to the very roots of this instrumental turning point in modern history.

With Our Backs to the Wall

Victory and Defeat in 1918

'At Victoria station the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked "This is your enemy". I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train . . .' 
 
In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. No ammunition') to the landing at Algiers in 1943 ('I closed my eyes and faced the sun. I fell down a hatchway'). 
 
Filled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese.

Adolf Hitler

My Part in his Downfall

Rodney Foster

"Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?" Not Colonel Rodney Foster, a platoon commander of the Kent Home Guard. 
 
Dad's Army, the iconic comedy series is as well-known today as it was forty years ago. But the reality of life in the Home Guard was often very different. Living directly beneath the Battle of Britain on the Kent coast, Colonel Rodney Foster, who illegally kept a diary every day of the War, commanded a company of men in the face of constant aerial bombardment and the ever-present threat of death from above - the Home Guard were the first barrier to Hitler's crack parachutists. Writing from the village hall, abandoned barns, churches and makeshift officers' messes, he records with a unique wit and wisdom the everyday details of family life during the war: the domestic routine dogged by air raid warnings, the antics of soldiers stationed nearby taking every chance to improve their lot, the quiet strength of a small community faced with great adversity.

The Real 'Dad's Army'

The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster

Glyn Prysor

During the Second World War the Royal Navy was the most powerful of Britain's armed forces. Its sailors fought across the globe in vast battleships and claustrophobic corvettes, makeshift minesweepers and silent submarines. They endured nerve-wracking convoys, fought epic gun battles, carried out deadly secret missions, rescued armies and landed the largest invasion force in history. Naval power was the foundation of Britain's war effort, and sailors shaped the nation's destiny. Drawing on hundreds of contemporary diaries and letters, Glyn Prysor's original and gripping narrative evokes the triumph and tragedy, horror and humanity of the war at sea, bringing to life the sailor's war as never before.

Citizen Sailors

The Royal Navy in the Second World War

Ian Kershaw

SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, SPECTATOR, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, DAILY MAIL and SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
In almost every major war there comes a point where defeat looms for one side and its rulers cut a deal with the victors, if only in an attempt to save their own skins. In Hitler's Germany, nothing of this kind happened: in the end the regime had to be stamped out town by town with an almost unprecedented level of brutality. Just what made Germany keep on fighting? 
 
Kershaw's gripping, revelatory book recounts these final months, from the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 to the German surrender in May 1945. 
 
Ian Kershaw is the author of Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris; Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis; Making Friends with Hitler; and Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-4. Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis received the Wolfson History Prize and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugural British Academy Book Prize. Until his retirement in 2008, Ian Kershaw was Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. For services to history he was given the German award of the Federal Cross of Merit in 1994. He was knighted in 2002 and awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2004. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and was the winner of the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2012.

The End

Germany, 1944-45

Niall Ferguson

The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead, the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong? How did we do this to ourselves? The War of the World comes up with compelling, fascinating answers. It is Niall Ferguson's masterpiece.

The War of the World

History's Age of Hatred

Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan is one of the most acclaimed figures in the analysis of Islam and its political dimensions today. In The Arab Awakening he explores the opportunities and challenges across North Africa and the Middle East, as they look to create new, more open societies. He asks: can Muslim countries bring together Islam, pluralism and democracy without betraying their identity? Will the Arab world be able to reclaim its memory to reinvent education, women's rights, social justice, economic growth and the fight against corruption? Can this emancipation be envisioned with Islam, experienced not as a straitjacket, but as an ethical and cultural wealth? 
 
Arguing that the debate cannot be reduced to a confrontation between two approaches - the modern and secular versus the traditional and Islamic - Ramadan demonstrates that not only are both of these routes in crisis, but that the Arab world has an historic opportunity: to stop blaming the West, to jettison its victim status and to create a truly new dynamic. Tariq Ramadan offers up a challenge to the Middle East: what enduring legacy will you produce, from the historic moment of the Arab Spring?

The Arab Awakening

Islam and the new Middle East

David Edgerton

GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
The familiar image of the British in the Second World War is that of the plucky underdog taking on German might. David Edgerton's bold, compelling new history shows the conflict in a new light, with Britain as a very wealthy country, formidable in arms, ruthless in pursuit of its interests and sitting at the heart of a global production system. 
 
The British, indeed Churchillian, vision of war and modernity was challenged by repeated defeat by less well equipped enemies. Yet the end result was a vindication of this vision. Like the United States, a powerful Britain won a cheap victory, while others paid a great price. Britain's War Machine, by putting resources, machines and experts at the heart of a global rather than merely imperial story, demolishes some of the most cherished myths about wartime Britain and gives us a very different and often unsettling picture of a great power in action

Britain's War Machine

Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War

Fearghal McGarry

In 1947 the Bureau of Military History was established by the Irish government to record the experiences of those who took part in the fight for independence. In 1959, the results of this research - including 1,773 'witness statements' - were placed in 83 steel boxes and locked into a strongroom in Government Buildings. Rebels, edited by one of Ireland's top young historians, brings the best of the surviving accounts of the Easter Rising together into a comprehensive, accessible and thrillingly readable telling of that much-debated insurrection, the first in a series of events that brought about Irish independence. From the witnesses' recollections of their schooling and other childhood influences to their accounts of what happened at Easter 1916, Rebels tells this famous story in a new and exhilarating way.

Rebels

Voices from the Easter Rising

The controversial revisionist history of World War I that made Niall Ferguson's name 
 
The First World War killed around eight million men and bled Europe dry. More than any other event, it made the twentieth century. In this boldly conceived book and provocative, aimed to appeal not only to students but also to the general reader, Niall Ferguson explodes many of the myths surrounding the war. 
 
Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, Visiting Professor of History, Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford. His other books for Penguin include Empire, The Cash Nexus, Colossus, The War of the World, Virtual History, High Financier and Civilization.

The Pity of War

Virginia Nicholson

We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed. 
 
In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's war, through a host of individual women's experiences. She tells how they loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ...

Millions Like Us

Women's Lives in the Second World War

Saul David

"The British soldier," wrote a Prussian officer who served with Wellington, "is vigorous, well fed, by nature highly brave and intrepid, trained to the most vigorous discipline, and admirably well armed... These circumstances explain how this army ... has never yet been defeated in the field." 
 
From the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the Downfall of Napoleon in 1815, Britain won a series of major wars against France that enabled her to lay the foundations of a global empire. By Waterloo, she was the paramount maritime and industrial power in the world, and would remain so for much of the nineteenth century. 
 
This is the story of that extraordinary century and a half of martial success and the people who made it possible: the soldier-kings William III and the first two Georges; the generals Marlborough, Wolfe, Moore and Wellington; and the ordinary British redcoats who - despite harsh service conditions that included low pay, poor housing, inadequate food and brutal discipline - rarely let their commanders down in battles as far afield as Blenheim, Plassey, Quebec and Waterloo.

All The King's Men

The British Soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo

Roald Dahl

'They didn't think for one moment that they would find anything but a burnt-out fuselage and a charred skeleton; and they were apparently astounded whn they came upon my still-breathing body, lying in the sand near by' 
 
In 1938 Roald Dahl was fresh out of school and bound for his first job in Africa, hoping to find adventure far from home. However, he got far more excitement than he bargained for when the outbreak of the Second World War led him to join the RAF. His account of his experiences in Africa, crashing a plane in the Western Desert, rescue and recovery from his horrific injuries in Alexandria, and many other daring deeds, recreates a world as bizarre and unnerving as any he wrote about in his fiction.

Going Solo

John Stubbs

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CAVALIERS BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR 
 
'Dashing and daring, colourful, subtle and provocative . . . stuffed almost to bursting-point with character and incident. Feasting on poems, diaries, plays, masques, letters and biographies, Reprobates introduces us to . . . a flamboyant parade of chancers, dreamers, turncoats, heroes, idiots and hedonists who grab the reader's shoulders and force a drink on us as if in some dim-lit, tallow-smoked tavern of the 1630s' Independent

Reprobates

The Cavaliers of the English Civil War

Lizzie Collingham

In World War Two, 19 million people died in the conflicts across the globe. Yet in those same years, more than 20 million died from starvation and malnutrition. In The Taste of War Lizzie Collingham shows how food - and its lack - was central to the war's causes and continuation. She explores how starvation was often a deliberate governmental policy, and reveals how the necessity of feeding whole countries lead to Pearl Harbour, Germany's invasion of Russia, and the Holocaust itself.

The Taste of War

World War Two and the Battle for Food

Colin Smith

John Bierman

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. In this Special, Colin Smith and John Bierman make the battle of Alamein come alive. 
 
A turning point in the Second World War, the battle of El Alamein was the culmination of a military campaign like no other. Fought across desolate arid terrain, the brutal fighting was matched by a camaraderie and respect between enemies as witnessed in no other theatre of war. Combining gritty personal testimonies with thorough journalistic investigation, John Bierman and Colin Smith present a compelling account of a ferocious but compassionate battle and a journey through the unforgiving North African landscape.

Great Battles: The Battle of Alamein

North Africa 1942

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. This is Saul David's compelling examination of one of history's greatest battles. 
 
On 22nd January, at Isandlwana in Zululand, South-East Africa, the British Army suffered one of the worst defeats in its history. A camp of 1,700 men, armed with state-of-the-art weapons and two artillery pieces, was surprised and overwhelmed by a huge Zulu army equipped with only spears. It became the seminal battle of the Zulu War, an ill-conceived, incompetently executed and fruitless campaign for the British. 
 
In this Penguin Short, Saul David presents a concise, devastating and utterly gripping account of the most brutal of battles that will transport you to the plains of Africa and the cauldron of war, and all for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Great Battles: The Battle of Isandlwana

The Great Zulu Victory of 1879

Ron Chernow

The celebrated Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of America. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life, he carries the reader through Washington's troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian Wars, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention and his magnificent performance as America's first president. 
 
Despite the reverence his name inspires Washington remains a waxwork to many readers, worthy but dull, a laconic man of remarkable self-control. But in this groundbreaking work Chernow revises forever the uninspiring stereotype. He portrays Washington as a strapping, celebrated horseman, elegant dancer and tireless hunter, who guarded his emotional life with intriguing ferocity. Not only did Washington gather around himself the foremost figures of the age, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, he orchestrated their actions to help realise his vision for the new federal government, define the separation of powers, and establish the office of the presidency. 
 
Ron Chernow takes us on a page-turning journey through all the formative events of America's founding. This is a magisterial work from one of America's foremost writers and historians.

Washington

A Life

C. J. Chivers

The AK-47, or 'Kalashnikov', is the most abundant and efficient firearm on earth. It is so light it can be used by children. It has transformed the way we fight wars, and its story is the chilling story of modern warfare. 
 
C. J. Chivers's extraordinary new book tells an alternative history of the world as seen through these terrible weapons. He traces them back to their origins in the early experiments of Gatling and Maxim, and examines the first appearance of the machine-gun. The quest for ever greater firepower and mobility culminated in the AK-47 at the beginning of the Cold War, a weapon so remarkable that, over sixty years after its invention and having broken free of all state control, it has become central to civil wars all over the world.

The Gun

The Story of the AK-47

Norman Stone

Those who survived the Second World War stared out onto a devastated, morally ruined world. Much of Europe and Asia had been so ravaged that it was unclear whether any form of normal life could ever be established again. 
 
Everywhere the 'Atlantic' world (the USA, Britain and a handful of allies) was on the defensive and its enemies on the move. For every Atlantic success there seemed to be a dozen Communist or 'Third World' successes, as the USSR and its proxies crushed dissent and humiliated the United States on both military and cultural grounds. For all the astonishing productivity of the American, Japanese and mainland western European economies (setting aside the fiasco of Britain's implosion), most of the world was either under Communist rule or lost in a violent stagnancy that seemed doomed to permanence. Then, suddenly, the Atlantic won - economically, ideologically, militarily - with astonishing speed and completeness.

The Atlantic and Its Enemies

A History of the Cold War

SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, SPECTATOR, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, DAILY MAIL and SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
The last months of the Second World War were a nightmarish time to be alive. Unimaginable levels of violence destroyed entire cities. Millions died or were dispossessed. By all kinds of criteria it was the end: the end of the Third Reich and its terrible empire but also, increasingly, it seemed to be the end of European civilization itself. 
 
In his gripping, revelatory new book Ian Kershaw describes these final months, from the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 to the German surrender in May 1945. The major question that Kershaw attempts to answer is: what made Germany keep on fighting? In almost every major war there has come a point where defeat has loomed for one side and its rulers have cut a deal with the victors, if only in an attempt to save their own skins. In Hitler's Germany, nothing of this kind happened: in the end the regime had to be stamped out town by town with a level of brutality almost without precedent. 
 
Both a highly original piece of research and a gripping narrative, The End makes vivid an era which still deeply scars Europe. It raises the most profound questions about the nature of the Second World War, about the Third Reich and about how ordinary people behave in extreme circumstances. 
 
Ian Kershaw is the author of Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris; Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis; Making Friends with Hitler; and Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-4. Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis received the Wolfson History Prize and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugural British Academy Book Prize. Until his retirement in 2008, Ian Kershaw was Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. For services to history he was given the German award of the Federal Cross of Merit in 1994. He was knighted in 2002 and awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2004. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and was the winner of the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2012.

Hitler's Germany, 1944-45

Amanda Foreman

'No two nations have ever existed on the face of the earth which could do each other so much good or so much harm' 
President Buchanan, State of the Nation Address, 1859 
 
 
A World on Fire tells, with extraordinary sweep, one of the least known great stories of British and American history. 
 
As America descended into Civil War, British loyalties were torn between support for the North, which was against slavery, and defending the South, which portrayed itself as bravely fighting for its independence. Rallying to their respective causes, thousands of Britons went to America as soldiers - fighting for both Union and Confederacy - racing ships through the Northern blockades, and as observers, nurses, adventurers, guerillas and spies. 
 
At the heart of this international conflict lay a complicated and at times tortuous relationship between four individuals: Lord Lyons, the painfully shy British Ambassador in Washington; William Seward, the blustering US Secretary of State; Charles Francis Adams, the dry but fiercely patriotic U.S. ambassador in London; and the restless and abrasive Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell. Despite their efforts, and sometimes as a result of them, America and Britain came within a whisker of declaring war on each other twice in four years. 
 
The diplomatic story is only one element in this gloriously multifaceted book. Using a wealth of previously unpublished letters and journals, Amanda Foreman gives fresh accounts of Civil War battles by seeing them through the eyes of British journalists and myriad soldiers on both sides, from flamboyant cavalry commanders to forcibly conscripted private soldiers. She also shows how the War took place in England, from the Confederacy's secret ship-building programme in Liverpool to the desperate efforts of its propagandists and emissaries - male and female - to influence British public opinion. She even shows how one of the most famous set-piece naval encounters of the War was fought, remarkably, in the English Channel. 
 
Foreman tells this epic yet intimate story of enormous personalities, tense diplomacy and torn loyalties as history in the round, captivating her readers with the experience of total immersion in this titanic conflict.

A World on Fire

An Epic History of Two Nations Divided

Daniel Swift

One night in June 1943 James Swift, along with the Lancaster bomber he piloted, vanished. In Bomber County, his grandson Daniel seeks to discover what happened. At the same time he tries to understand the men who took part in these dangerous raids, as well as their devastating impact on the civilians below. In examining the life of one pilot, Daniel Swift also investigates why it is we have tried to forget what was then a new, shocking form of warfare, and why literature and poetry exploring these terrible losses have not found the recognition they deserve.

Bomber County

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. 
 
His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition. 
 
Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

Everyman's Library P G WODEHOUSE

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

Everyman's Library POCKET CLASSICS

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Everyman's Library POCKET POETS

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Ex-Heroes

Explore with Peter Rabbit

Extraordinary Lives

Factory Girls

Fairwick Chronicles

Fairytale in Progress

Faith, Hope and Glory

Laid-back Roman detective Marcus Didius Falco investigates crimes in the dangerous world of first century Rome, a place of political intrigue, corruption and murder.

Falco

Fall of the Dragon

Luce doesn’t like the sound of the Sword and Cross reform school, and it lives up to all her expectations. Until she meets Daniel. He’s perfect, but what she doesn’t realise is that they have met before. Many times. He is a fallen angel, and each time they meet they are torn apart, Luce dying and Daniel forced to live on without her. They think that they have found a way to break the curse, but they will have to make great sacrifices along the way. Love never dies in this darkly romantic series which spans centuries in its storytelling.

Fallen

Falling Kingdoms

Far Out Five

Far-Flung Adventures

Sam and Remi Fargo are a husband and wife team on a quest. Treasure hunters, they travel the world looking for ancient artefacts and exotic bounty. They're in it for the history and the mystery, but others are not so honourable, and the Fargo's often find themselves caught up in ancient riddles, desperate to solve the puzzle before the bad guys get there first.

Fargo Adventures

Fate & Flame

Father Brown

Father, I Don’t Want This Marriage

Faust

Feral Love

More than 100 million copies sold worlwide, this is a series that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.

Fifty Shades

Find Spot

Finn Fitzpatrick Series

First Favourite Tales

The First Festivals series invites children to explore the world's culture from the comfort of their home, encourages the development of hand-eye coordination and is recommended for children aged 2 and over.

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