Alan Curtis

Alan Cutler

Alan Davies

Alan Dean Foster

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

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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

Orlando Figes

The terrible conflict that dominated the mid 19th century, the Crimean War killed at least 800,000 men and pitted Russia against a formidable coalition of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire. It was a war for territory, provoked by fear that if the Ottoman Empire were to collapse then Russia could control a huge swathe of land from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. But it was also a war of religion, driven by a fervent, populist and ever more ferocious belief by the Tsar and his ministers that it was Russia's task to rule all Orthodox Christians and control the Holy Land. 
 
Orlando Figes' major new book reimagines this extraordinary war, in which the stakes could not have been higher and which was fought with a terrible mixture of ferocity and incompetence. It was both a recognisably modern conflict - the first to be extensively photographed, the first to employ the telegraph, the first 'newspaper war' - and a traditional one, with illiterate soldiers, amateur officers and huge casualties caused by disease. Drawing on a huge range of fascinating sources, Figes also gives the lived experience of the war, from that of the ordinary British soldier in his snow-filled trench, to the haunted, gloomy, narrow figure of Tsar Nicholas himself as he vows to take on the whole world in his hunt for religious salvation.

Crimea

Jay O'Donnell

Humphrey Price

'The sky had gone: in its place was a wall of water, white horses on the top, readying itself to fall on me.' 
 
What kind of man throws himself out of a helicopter in a storm? 
Or dangles by a thread over mountainous waves? 
Or strikes a panicking sailor to save his life? 
 
Aircrewman Jay O'Donnell, a former Royal Navy Search and Rescue diver, has seen - and lived - it all. Scrambled at a moment's notice, in all weathers - but usually the worst - he and the crew of Sea King Rescue 194 have braved some of the most frightening storms ever to lash the UK. 
 
In this gripping account, O'Donnell describes the mix of bravery and terror that comes with every call. He explains the rigours of training; tells of grisly tasks like fishing bodies out the sea; conveys the horror of being winched 80 feet in a storm while clutching a squirming baby, or being dragged through freezing waters on a loose line. 
 
Culminating in the astonishing, hair-raising rescue of 26 crew from the MSC Napoli disaster in Cornwall, January 2007 - where O'Donnell was decorated for his courage and refusal to give up in appalling conditions - Rescue 194 is an unforgettable tribute to the Royal Navy's search and rescue crews.

Rescue 194

Sean McMeekin

WINNER OF THE BARBARA JELAVICH BOOK PRIZE 
 
'Sean McMeekin has written a classic of First World War history ... This superb and original book is the reality behind Greenmantle' Norman Stone 
 
The Berlin-Baghdad Express explores one of the big, previously unresearched subjects of the First World War: the German bid for world power - and the destruction of the British Empire - through the harnessing of the Ottoman Empire. 
 
McMeekin's book shows how incredibly high the stakes were in the Middle East - with the Germans in the tantalizing position of taking over the core of the British Empire via the extraordinary railway that would link Central Europe and the Persian Gulf. Germany sought the Ottoman Empire as an ally to create jihad against the British - whose Empire at the time was the largest Islamic power in the world. 
 
The Berlin-Baghdad Express is a fascinating account of western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It explains and brings to life a massive area of fighting, which in most other accounts is restricted to the disaster at Gallipoli and the British invasions of Iraq and Palestine.

The Berlin-Baghdad Express

The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, 1898-1918

Robert Graves

'There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and corpses . . .' 
 
In one of the most honest and candid self-portraits ever committed to paper, Robert Graves tells the extraordinary story of his experiences as a young officer in the First World War. He describes life in the trenches in vivid, raw detail, how the dehumanizing horrors he witnessed left him shell-shocked. They were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Goodbye to All That

Alexis Soyer

The flamboyant Frenchman Alexis Soyer was the most renowned chef in Victorian England. This is his colourful account of his time at the front in the Crimean War, where he joined British troops in order to improve the quality of the food they were eating. 
 
Divulging the secrets of preparing stew for 1000 soldiers, sharing sweetmeats with a Turkish Pacha, and teaching a Highland regiment to cook with his pioneering gas-fuelled 'field stove' that would be used by armies up until the Second World War, Soyer gives a vividly enjoyable lesson in making a little go a long way.

The Chef at War

Martin Davidson

In 1926, at the age of twenty, a trainee dentist called Bruno Langbehn joined the Nazi party. Growing up in a Germany that was impoverished and humiliated by the defeat of the First World War, and surrounded by a fiercely military environment, Bruno was one of the first young men to sign up. And as the party rose to power, he was there every step of the way. Eventually his loyalty was rewarded with a high-ranking position in Hitler's dreaded SS, the elite security service charged with sending Germany's 'racially impure' to the death camps. 
 
For fifty years after the end of the Second World War, his family kept this horrifying secret until his British grandson, Martin Davidson, uncovered the truth. Drawing on an astonishing cache of personal documents, Davidson retraces Bruno's journey from disillusioned adolescent to SS Officer to mysterious grandfather. In this extraordinary account he tries to understand how Langbehn and millions of others like him were seduced by Hitler's regime, and attempts to come to terms with this devastating revelation.

The Perfect Nazi

Uncovering My SS Grandfather's Secret Past and How Hitler Seduced a Generation

S. M. Plokhy

Imagine you could eavesdrop on a dinner party with three of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. In this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in the room with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as they meet at a climactic turning point in the war to hash out the terms of the peace. 
 
The ink wasn't dry when the recriminations began. The conservatives who hated Roosevelt's New Deal accused him of selling out. Was he too sick? Did he give too much in exchange for Stalin's promise to join the war against Japan? Could he have done better in Eastern Europe? Both Left and Right would blame Yalta for beginning the Cold War. 
 
Plokhy's conclusions, based on unprecedented archival research, are surprising. He goes against conventional wisdom-cemented during the Cold War- and argues that an ailing Roosevelt did better than we think. Much has been made of FDR's handling of the Depression; here we see him as wartime chief. Yalta is authoritative, original, vividly- written narrative history, and is sure to appeal to fans of Margaret MacMillan's bestseller Paris 1919.

Yalta

The Price of Peace

Noam Chomsky

In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky surveys the threats and prospects of our early twenty-first century. Exploring challenges such as the growing gap between North and South, American exceptionalism (even under Obama), the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli assault on Gaza and the recent financial bailouts, he also sees hope for the future and a way to move forward - in the so-called democratic wave in Latin America and in the global solidarity movements which suggest 'real progress towards freedom and justice'. 
 
Hopes and Prospects is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the primary challenges still facing the human race and is wondering where to find a ray of hope.

Hopes and Prospects

Tristram Hunt

Almost a quarter of a million lives were lost as King and Parliament battled for their religious and political ideals in the English Civil War. England was divided between Cavaliers and Roundheads engaged in bitter struggles from Preston to Lostwithiel, Pembroke to York. Armies were on the march, villages were decimated and great dynasties destroyed: fathers and sons, uncles and cousins were pitted against each other in defence of their loyalties. The civil war led to the execution of a king, the beginnings of sectarian division in Ireland, savage clan warfare in Scotland and the roots of English socialism. 
 
Tristram Hunt avoids adding to the many, mostly transitory interpretations of the civil war and instead offers a timeless narrative based on the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed these traumatic events. In doing so he brings out the voices of the civil war generation - those who lost sons, who witnessed massacres and who fought for an ideal. In this book we see their motivations, fears and misery as the horror of war overwhelmed them. From Cromwell's letters to the memoirs of a Roundhead wife the civil war era is brought to life in all its terrible and fascinating glory.

The English Civil War At First Hand

Harold Nicolson

"If we in Great Britain are resolute and wise there will emerge from this catastrophe something which may well give hope to the world" 
 
First published in 1939 as a Penguin Special, this is the original best-selling account of why Britain went to war with Germany. In simple terms it describes the stages of Adolf Hitler's ruthless pursuit for power, identifies his methods of deception and false diplomacy, and details his terrifying use of force that rendered peaceful negotiation increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. Shining a light on Hitler's early life and character, Harold Nicolson reveals the dictator's political theories in Mein Kampf, and explains the strategies he adopted in seizing the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and later Poland. 
 
Written with clarity and insight, and read widely by soldiers during World War II, the final message of hope and peace is as relevant today as it was in 1939. 
 
This facsimile edition includes a new introduction by Andrew Roberts, best-selling author of The Storm of War; Masters and Commanders and Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership.

Why Britain is at War

With a New Introduction by Andrew Roberts

Miranda Carter

Three cousins. Three Emperors. And the road to ruin. 
 
As cousins, George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the last Tsar Nicholas II should have been friends - but they happened also to rule Europe's three most powerful states. This potent combination together with their own destructive personalities - petty, insecure, bullying, absurdly obsessive (stamp collecting, uniforms) - led not only to their own dramatic fallouts and falls from grace, but also to the outbreak of the First World War. 
 
Miranda Carter's riveting account of how three men who should have known better helped bring down an entire world is a gripping story of abdication, betrayal and murder.

The Three Emperors

Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One

Erica Martin Thriller

Eternal Ones

Eve of Man Trilogy

Everyman's Library Barbreck

Everyman's Children's Classics has more than 50 titles in print. It offers the finest editions currently available of the world's greatest children's books in handsome, full cloth hardcover bindings. 
 
The library brings back into print major illustrators such as Ivan Bilibin, Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, Nicolas Bentley, Walter Crane, Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Ardizzone, W.Heath Robinson and Mervyn Peake.

Everyman's Library CHILDREN'S CLASSICS

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Everyman's Library CLASSICS

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.

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