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

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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Norman Longmate

Although nearly 90% of the population of Great Britain remained civilians throughout the war, or for a large part of it, their story has so far largely gone untold. In contrast with the thousands of books on military operations, barely any have concerned themselves with the individual's experience. The problems of the ordinary family are barely ever mentioned - food rationing, clothes rationing, the black-out and air raids get little space, and everyday shortages almost none at all. 
 
This book is an attempt to redress the balance; to tell the civilian's story largely through their own recollections and in their own words.

How We Lived Then

History of Everyday Life During the Second World War, A

John Prebble

This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the 'Common Men' on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chatten and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Andrew Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chatten to reach him, likening them to 'a troop of hungry wolves'. Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles' army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-soldier's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle is as much a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.

Culloden

Beatrice Heuser

Clausewitz's On War, first published in 1832, remains the most famous study of the nature and conditions of warfare. Contemporaries found him 'endearing' or 'totally unpalatable', while later generations called him 'the father of modern strategical study', whose tenets have 'eternal relevance', or dismissed him as outdated. Was it really he who made the discovery that warfare is a continuation of politics? Was he the 'Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre', in part responsible for the mass slaughter of the First World War, as Liddell Hart contended? Can the idea of total war be traced back to him? Complex and often misunderstood, Clausewitz has fascinated and influenced generations of politicians and strategic thinkers. 
 
Beatrice Heuser's study is the first book, not only on how to read Clausewitz, but also on how others have read him - from the Prussian and German masters of warfare of the late nineteenth century through to the military commanders of the First World War, through Lenin and Mao Zedong to strategists in the nuclear age and of guerrilla warfare. The result is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the work and influence of the greatest classic on the art of war.

Reading Clausewitz

Philip Ziegler

In 1939 London was not merely the greatest city in the world, it was the most tempting and vulnerable target for aerial attack.  For six years it was the frontline of the free world's battle against Fascism.  It endured the horrors of the Blitz of 1940 and 1941, the V1s, the V2s.  Other cities suffered more intensely; no other city was so constantly under attack for so long a time. This is the story of London at war - or, perhaps, of Londoners at war, for Philip Ziegler, known best as a biographer, is above all fascinated by the people who found their lives so suddenly and violently transformed: the querulous, tiresome yet strangely gallant housewife from West Hampstead; the turbulent, left-wing retired schoolmaster from Walthamstow, always having a go at the authorities; the odiously snobbish middleclass lady from Kensington, sneering at the scum who took shelter in the Underground; the typist from Fulham, the plumber from Woolwich.  It was their war, quite as much as it was Churchill's or the King's, and this is their history. Through a wealth of interviews and unpublished letters and diaries, as well as innumerable books and newspapers, the author has built up a vivid picture of a population under siege.  There were cowards, there were criminals, there were incompetents, but what emerges from these pages is above all a record of astonishing patience, dignity and courage.  'I hope,' Ziegler writes, 'we will never have to endure again what they went through between 1939 and 1945.  I hope, if we did, that we would conduct ourselves as well.'

London At War

1939 - 1945

Ben Shephard

'I wish you could be here," the Oxford Professor of Medicine wrote to a friend in 1915, "in this orgy of neuroses and psychoses and gaits and paralyses. I cannot imagine what has got into the central nervous system of the men.' 
 
A War of Nerves is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century - an authoritative, accessible account drawing on a vast range of diaries, interviews, medical papers and official records. It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of mental medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of 'shell-shock', combat fatigue and 'post-traumatic stress disorder'. 
 
At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, it tells the full story of 'shell-shock'; explains the disastrous psychological aftermath of Vietnam; and shows how psychiatrists kept men fighting in Burma. But it also tries to answer recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology or simple biochemistry? It explores the ethical dilemmas of the military psychiatrist - the 'machine gun behind the front', as Freud called him. Finally, it looks at the modern culture of 'trauma' and compensation spawned by the Vietnam War. 
 
A War of Nerves offers the general reader an indispensable guide to an important and controversial subject.

A War Of Nerves

Martin Gilbert

When Hitler announced that the result of the war in Europe would be 'the complete annihilation of the Jews', he did so in 1942, not only in public, but before an enormous crowd in Berlin. The Allies heard, but, astonishingly, they did not listen. 
 
In 1944, Allied reconnaissance pilots, searching out industrial targets in the area, repeatedly photographed Auschwitz. The pictures, apparently overlooked by the Allies, were routinely filed in government archives and not examined until 1979. 
 
First-hand reports on the horrors of the death camps came to the West by 1944 in the person of two escaped Auschwitz prisoners. Their testimonies, and those of subsequent escapees, were either ignored or dismissed. 
 
Despite the fact that, the same year, Churchill himself had ordered feasibility studies for air strikes on Auschwitz, the RAF not only did nothing, but eventually passed the buck to the Americans, who also did nothing. This book explains the reasons why.

Auschwitz And The Allies

David Miller

From 1949 to 1991 the world was overshadowed by the Cold War. Repeatedly it seemed that in days, even hours, global nuclear conflict would sweep away much of the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe. They would be obliterated in what President Carter described as 'one long, final and very bleak afternoon'. When the Cold War ended, the Warsaw Pact was wound up and the vast military forces which had flourished for over forty years were disbanded. As with all wars, however, it was only then that the realities of what had been involved began to emerge; indeed, much has remained hidden until now.In The Cold War, David Miller discloses not only the vast scope of the military resources involved, but also how nearly threat came to terrible reality. Most chillingly of all, he reveals that while the menace of nuclear war predominated, it was actually little understood even by the experts. The book examines each military area in turn, covering the formation of the two great alliances, and the strategies and major weapons in the rival navies, armies and air forces. That the Cold War ended without a conflict was due to professionalism on both sides. The result, Miller suggests, would have impressed the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tsu, who, writing in the fifth century BC, said that 'to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill'.

The Cold War

A Military History

Christopher Hill

This illuminating collection of essays assesses the seventeenth century, interpreting what used to be called 'The Puritan Revolution', the ideas which helped to produce it and resulted from it, and the relation between these ideas and the political and economic events of the day. Each essay approaches the subject from a different angle, looking at aspects of the revolution - whether religious, constitutional, economic or biographical - in conjunction with a lively sympathy for the men who lived in that revolutionary time. Analysing the writings of Marvell, Hobbes, Harrington and Samuel Richardson, as well as less 'respectable' writers, Professor Hill examines the legacy of the Reformation and the inspiration provided by ideals like the Brotherhood of Man and the desire to re-create a pre-Norman Golden Age. A book that no serious student of our history should miss; it is a treasury of interesting detail and strong ideas, CV Wedgwood.

Puritanism & Revolution

Robert Remini

In 1815 Britain's crack troops, fresh from the victories against Napoleon, were stunningly defeated near New Orleans by a ragtag army of citizen-soldiers under the commander they dubbed 'Old Hickory', Andrew Jackson. It was this battle that defined the United States as a military power to be reckoned with and an independent democracy here to stay. 
 
A happenstance coalition of militiamen, regulars, untrained frontiersmen, free blacks, pirates, Indians and townspeople - marching to 'Yankee Doodle' and 'La Marseillaise' - inhabit The Battle of New Orleans in a rich array of colourful scenes. Swashbuckling Jean Lafitte and his privateers. The proud, reckless British General Pakenham and his miserable men ferried across a Louisiana lake in a Gulf storm. The agile Choctaw and Tennessee 'dirty shirt' sharpshooters who made a sport of picking off redcoat sentries by night. And Jackson himself - tall, gaunt, shrewd, by turns gentle and furious, declaring 'I will smash them, so help me God!' 
 
Robert Remini's vivid evocation of this glorious, improbable victory is more than a masterful military history. It proves that only after the Battle of new Orleans could Americans say with confidence that they were Americans, not subjects of a foreign power. It was the triumph that catapulted a once-poor, uneducated orphan boy into the White House and forged a collection of ex-colonies and dissenters into a nation.

Battle of New Orleans

Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory

Garrett Mattingly

Garrett Mattingly's thrilling narrative sets out the background of the sixteenth-century European intrigue and religious unrest that gave rise to one of the world's most famous maritime crusades and the naval battles that decided its fate.                                                                                                               In putting the naval campaign of 1588 back into the context of the first great international crisis of modern history, Mattingly builds up, like the movements of a symphony, a broad picture of how events of the time affected men's actions, plans and hopes. He brilliantly connects a series of scenes or episodes, shifting the point of focus from England to the continent and from courts to ships and cities. The feeling of tension mounts to a crescendo throughout Europe as the great drama of the Armada is approached. The battle itself and the aftermath are so vividly and poignantly described that they might be happening in our world today.                                                                                                                               'A rare and wonderful book, as readable and exciting as a novel, amazingly fresh and stimulating in its approach to a great subject, and impressive for the wide range and authority of its scholarship.' J.E. Neale

The Defeat Of The Spanish Armada

Marie Vassiltchikov

Marie `Missie' Vassiltchikov as a White Russian émigrée caught with her family in Hitler`s Germany at the outbreak of the war. She was a Bright Young Thing, part of the cosmopolitan set who managed to maintain a trance-like normality until as late as 1941 - picnics, house-parties, dinners at the Eden... 
 
Before long, however, Missie became sickened by the brutal and repressive nature of Nazi rule which overshadowed every aspect of her life. Through Adam Von Trott, for whom she worked in the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, she became involved in the Resistance and the diaries vividly describe her part in the drama of July 1944 and its appalling aftermath. 
 
Living among the ruins of Berlin during Allied bombing raids, she grows us to be strong-minded, committed and courageous woman as she daily displays uncommon bravery in the face of the Gestapo and the detestable Dr Six of the SS. Having survived the Nazis, Missie ends the diaries as she flees from Vienna, where she has been working as a nurse, before the advancing Red Army.

The Berlin Diaries 1940-45

Frank McLynn

Everyone knows what William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but in recent years is has become customary to assume that the victory was virtually inevitable, given the alleged superiority of Norman military technology. In this new study, underpinned by biographical sketches of the great warriors who fought for the crown of England in 1066, Frank McLynn shows that this view is mistaken. The battle on Senlac Hill on 14 October was a desperately close-run thing, which Harold lost only because of an incredible run of bad fortune and some treachery from the Saxon elite in England. Both William and Harold were fine generals, but Harold was the more inspirational of the two. 
 
Making use of all the latest scholarship, McLynn shows that most of our 'knowledge' of 1066 rests on myths or illusions: Harold did not fight at Hastings with the same army with which he had been victorious at Stamford Bridge three weeks earlier; the Battle of Senlac was not won by Norman archery; Harold did not die with an arrow in the eye. In overturning these myths, McLynn shows that the truth is even more astonishing than the legend. An original feature of the book is the space devoted to the career and achievements of Harald Hardrada, who usually appears in such narratives as the shadowy 'third man'. McLynn shows that he was probably the greatest warrior of the three and that he, in turn, lost a battle through unforeseen circumstances.

1066

The Year of The Three Battles

General Hackett

John Hackett

Badly wounded at the battle of Arnhem, and then spirited from his hospital bed by the Dutch Resistance, Brigadier John Hackett spent the winter of 1944 in Nazi-occupied Holland, hidden by a Dutch family, at great risk to their own lives, in a house a stone's throw from a German military police billet. After four months in hiding, Hackett was at last well enough to strap a battered suitcase to an ancient bicycle and set out on a high adventure which would, he hoped, lead him to freedom.

I Was A Stranger

Nigel Bagnall

The Punic Wars (264-146BC) sprang from a mighty power struggle between two ancient civilisations - the trading empire of Carthage and the military confedoration of Rome. It was a period of astonishing human misfortune, lasting over a period of 118 years and resulting in the radical depletion of Rome's population and resources and the complete annihilation of Carthage. 
 
All this took place more than 2,000 years ago, yet, as Nigel Bagnall's comprehensive history demonstrates, the ancient conflict is remarkable for its contemporary revelance.

The Punic Wars

Rome, Carthage and the Struggle for the Mediterranean

Neil Sheehan

'Superb. If you ever read just one history of the Vietnam war, read and admire and celebrate this one ' John le Carré 
 
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 
 
Outspoken, professional and fearless, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann went to Vietnam in 1962, full of confidence in America's might and right to prevail. He was soon appalled by the South Vietnamese troops' unwillingness to fight, by their random slaughter of civilians and by the arrogance and corruption of the US military. He flouted his supervisors and leaked his sharply pessimistic - and, as it turned out, accurate - assessments to the US press corps in Saigon. Among them was Sheehan, who became fascinated by the angry Vann, befriended him and followed his tragic and reckless career. 
 
Sixteen years in the making, A Bright Shining Lie is an eloquent and disturbing portrait of a man who in many ways personified the US war effort in Vietnam, of a solider cast in the heroic mould, an American Lawrence of Arabia. Blunt, idealistic, patronising to the Vietnamese, Vann was haunted by a shameful secret - the fact that he was the illegitimate son of a 'white trash' prostitute. Gambling away his career, Vann left the army that he loved and returned to Vietnam as a civilian in the pacification programme. He rose to become the first American civilian to wield a general's command in war. When he was killed in 1972, he was mourned at Arlington cemetery by leading political figures of the day. Sheehan recounts his astonishing story in this intimate and intense meditation on a conflict that scarred the conscience of a nation.

A Bright Shining Lie

John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

Richard Pipes

It is my considered judgement that, had it not been for the Russian Revolution, there would very likely have been no National Socialism; probably no Second World War and no decolonization; and certainly no Cold War, which one dominated our lives. I will attempt here to distill the essence of my books The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by raising the three central questions addressed in those volumes: Why did tsarism fall? Why did the Bolsheviks gain power? Why did Stalin succeed Lenin?' Richard Popes, from Three Whys of the Russian Revolution. 
 
Arguably the most important event of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution changed for ever the course of modern history. Due to the Soviet clampdown on archives regarding the Revolution, many aspects of the event have been shrouded in mystery for over seventy years. However, since the collapse of Communism the archival depositories havebeen thrown open to interested parties. 
 
The author of several groundbreaking and controversial works on Russian history, Richard Pipes has written an invaluable book for anyone who wishes to understand the complicated events taking place in Russia today.

Three Whys Of Russian Revolution

John Keegan

In this comprehensive history, John Keegan explores both the technical and the human impact of the greatest war of all time. He focuses on five crucial battles and offers new insights into the distinctive methods and motivations of modern warfare. In knowledgable, perceptive analysis of the airborne battle of Crete, the carrier battle of Midway, the tank battle of Falaise, the city battle of Berlin, and the amphibious battle of Okinawa, Keegan illuminates the strategic dilemmas faced by the leaders and the consequences of their decisions on the fighting men and the course of the war as a whole.

The Second World War

Gitta Sereny

The biography of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp - a classic and utterly compelling study of evil 
 
Only four men commanded Nazi extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps. Franz Stangl was one of the. Gitta Sereny's investigation of this man's mind, and of the influences which shaped him, has become a classic. Stangl commanded Treblinka and was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter there of at least 900, 000 people. Sereny, after weeks of talk with him and months of further research, shows us this man as he saw himself, and 'as he was seen by many others, including his wife. 
 
To horrify is not Sereny's aim, though horror is inevitable. She is seeking an answer to the question which beggars reason: How were human beings turned into instruments of such overwhelming evil? 
 
Gitta Sereny is of Hungarian-Austrian extraction and is trilingual in English, French and German. During the Second World War she became a social worker, caring for war-damaged children in France. She gave hundreds of lectures in schools and colleges in America and, when the war ended, she worked as a Child Welfare Officer in UNRRA displaced persons' camps in Germany. In 1949 she married the American Vogue photographer Don Honeyman and settled in London, where they brought up a son and a daughter and where she began her career as a journalist. 
 
Her journalistic work was of great variety but focussed particularly on the Third Reich and troubled children. She wrote mainly for the Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Sunday Times, The Times, the Independent and the Independent on Sunday Review. She also contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines around the world. 
 
Her books include: The Medallion, a novel; The Invisible Children, on child prostitution; Into That Darkness; and a biographical examination of Albert Speer. Gitta Sereny died in June 2012

Into That Darkness

From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder

Donald R Morris

In 1879, armed only with their spears, their rawhide shields, and their incredible courage, the Zulus challenged the might of Victorian England and, initially, inflicted on the British the worst defeat a modern army has ever suffered at the hands of men without guns. 
 
This is the definitive account of the rise of the Zulu nation under the great ruler Shaka and its fall under Cetshwayo. The story is studded with tales of drama and heroism: the Battle of Isandhlwana, where the Zulu army wiped out the major British column; and Rorke's Drift, where a handful of British troops beat off thousands of Zulu warriors and won eleven Victoria Crosses. 
 
Acclaimed for its scholarship, its monumental range, and its spellbinding readability, The Washing of the Spears is a gripping portrait of not just the Zulu War of 1879, but also of Britain’s colonial policy at this moment.

The Washing Of The Spears

The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879

Ronald Fraser

We discover what civil war, revolution and counter-revolution actually felt like from inside both camps. The contours of the war take shape through the words of the eyewitnesses. The atmosphere of events is vividly recaptured. And though the lived experience of the participants is revealed the uniquely tragic essence of all civil war. 'Fascinating and brilliantly unorthodox. ' Hugh Thomas, author of THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO.

Blood Of Spain

An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

Norman F Dixon

M Dixon

This unique and penetrating book surveys 100 years of military inefficiency from the Crimean War, through the Boer conflict, to the disasterous campaigns of the First World War and the calamities of the Second. It examines the social psychology of military organizations, provides case studies of individual commanders and identifies an alarming pattern in the causes of military disaster. 
 
Absorbing and original, this is the definitive history of military failures.

On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence

Paul Addison

The Road to 1945 is a rigorously researched study of the crucial moment when political parties put aside their differences to unite under Churchill and focus on the task of war. But the war years witnessed a radical shift in political power - dramatically expressed in Labour's decisive electoral victory in 1945. 
 
In his acclaimed study, Paul Addison reconstructs and interprets the five-year wartime coalition, and traces this sea-change from its roots in the thirties, to the powerful spirit of post-war rebuilding. 
 
The Road to 1945 is an imaginative, brilliantly written and landmark work, underpinned by a powerful and expertly researched argument.

The Road To 1945

British Politics and the Second World War Revised Edition

Ian Gilmour

Britain in the eighteenth century was deeply divided; riots over politics, food and religion were endemic. Despite the relative liberty of English institutions; the penal code was the harshest in Europe - stealing a hankerchief was a capital offence. In this brilliant history of the hidden side of the eighteenth century, Ian Gilmour argues that violence usually stemmed from the incompetence or arrogance of the ruling class. He tells the story of the great rebellions - of Scotland in 1715 and 1745, of Ireland in 1798 - and the famous episodes of Wilkes and Gordon. But he also paints a vivid picture of the vicious discipline of the army, skulduggery at elections, the class violence of industrial struggles, the ritual violence of duelling and the swingeing punishment of poachers.

Riots, Rising And Revolution

Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England

Angus Calder

The Myth of the Blitz was nurtured at every level of society. It rested upon the assumed invincibility of an island race distinguished by good humour, understatement and the ability to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat by team work, improvisation and muddling through. 
 
In fact, in many ways, the Blitz was not like that. Sixty-thousand people were conscientious objectors; a quarter of London's population fled to the country; Churchill and the royal family were booed while touring the aftermath of air-raids; Britain was not bombed into classless democracy. 
 
Angus Calder provides a compelling examination of the events of 1940 and 1941 - when Britain 'stood alone' against the Luftwaffe - and of the Myth which sustained her 'finest hour'.

The Myth Of The Blitz

The Second World War was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. 
 
In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life on the Home Front, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all this revisionist and important work reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic. 
 
Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1970, The People’s War draws on oral testimony and a mass of neglected social documentation to question the popularised image of national unity in the fight for victory.

The People's War

Britain 1939-1945

Samuel Hynes

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time. England after the war was a different place; the arts were different; history was different; sex, society, class were all different. 
 
Samuel Hynes examines the process of that transformation. He explores a vast cultural mosaic comprising novels and poetry, music and theatre, journalism, paintings, films, parliamentary debates, public monuments, sartorial fashions, personal diaries and letters. 
 
Told in rich detail, this penetrating account shatters much of the received wisdom about the First World War. It shows how English culture adapted itself to the needs of killing, how our stereotypes of the war gradually took shape and how the nations thought and imagination were profoundly and irretrievably changed.

A War Imagined

The First World War and English Culture

Alan Clark

The landmark exposé of incompetent leadership on the Western Front - why the British troops were lions led by donkeys 
 
On 26 September 1915, twelve British battalions – a strength of almost 10,000 men – were ordered to attack German positions in France. In the three-and-a-half hours of the battle, they sustained 8,246 casualties. The Germans suffered no casualties at all. 
 
Why did the British Army fail so spectacularly? What can be said of the leadership of generals? And most importantly, could it have all been prevented? In The Donkeys, eminent military historian Alan Clark scrutinises the major battles of that fateful year and casts a steady and revealing light on those in High Command - French, Rawlinson, Watson and Haig among them - whose orders resulted in the virtual destruction of the old professional British Army. Clark paints a vivid and convincing picture of how brave soldiers, the lions, were essentially sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent officers – the donkeys. 
 
‘An eloquent and painful book... Clark leaves the impression that vanity and stupidity were the main ingredients of the massacres of 1915. He writes searingly and unforgettably’ Evening Standard

The Donkeys

Tom Pocock

Alan Moorehead was lionised as a literary man of action: the most famous war correspondent of the Second World War; the award-winning and best-selling author of books that vividly combin adventure and hisotry; the star travel-writer of the New Yorker; and a pioneer advocate of wildlife conservation. Drawing on Moorehead's diaries and correspondence, as well as interviews with his family and friends, Tom Pocock tells the story of a thrilling, but ultimately tragic, life.

Alan Moorehead

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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