The engrossing but tragic history of the Royal Navy’s worst loss of World War Two.

Ideal for readers of Jonathan Dimbleby, Max Hastings and Craig L. Symonds.

On 8th June 1940, the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two destroyer escorts HMS Ardent and Acasta were sighted by the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst and her sister ship Gneisenau. In a brutal gun battle that lasted over an hour all British ships were sunk and more than 1500 men lost their lives.

Why had Glorious left the main troop convoy to proceed independently? Why was she so lightly protected? Why did British Intelligence give no warning that the German battlecruisers were close by? And why were the survivors left in freezing Arctic waters for three days before being picked up?

Official documents do not answer these questions and so John Winton has drawn testimonies from men who served on Glorious in the pre-war days as well as her very few survivors to understand how this ship functioned both before and during the war, what happened on that fateful day and why is there still so much secrecy surrounding this heart-rending event.

“Winton paints the best and most complete picture of any carrier of any navy” Naval War College Review

Carrier Glorious: The Life and Death of an Aircraft Carrier is an extraordinary history of this ship from her early beginnings as a battle cruiser in the First World War to her conversion into an aircraft carrier and service through the interwar years before uncovering what truly went on in her battle with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

New York Times Bestseller: The “fascinating” true story of John Dale Cavaness, a much-admired Illinois doctor—and the cold-blooded killer of his own son (The Washington Post).

Fusing the narrative power of an award-winning novelist and the detailed research of an experienced investigator, author Darcy O’Brien unfolds the story of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, the southern Illinois physician and surgeon charged with the murder of his son Sean in December 1984. Outraged by the arrest of the skilled medical practitioner who selflessly attended to their needs, the people of Little Egypt, as the natives call their region, rose to his defense.
But during the subsequent trial, a radically different, disquieting portrait of Dr. Cavaness would emerge. Throughout the three decades that he enjoyed the admiration and respect of his community, Cavaness was privately terrorizing his family, abusing his employees, and making disastrous financial investments. As more and more grisly details of the Cavaness case come to stark Midwestern light in O’Brien’s chilling account, so too does the hidden gothic underside of rural America and its heritage of violence and blood.

“This is the story of men and machines, a tale that took fifty years to unfold and is still being written.” – Robert J. Serling

One year before Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Western began flying the U.S. mail from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. Those were the wild and woolly days of aviation, when freewheeling pilots braved impossible odds on almost every run — flying the treacherous Rocky Mountain routes in wood-and-fabric biplanes, without benefit of instruments. They navigated by following the railroad tracks — and at first the only passengers they attracted were thrill seekers willing to endure the ride perched on top of a mail sack.

But Western advanced with the aviation industry, expanding rapidly in the thirties and shifting to passenger service as its prime source of revenue. The airline now flies approximately twenty-two thousand passengers a day to more than forty cities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Here is a full-scale, comprehensive, and compelling history of America’s oldest scheduled air carrier — Western Airlines — which celebrated its ninetieth anniversary in 2016. The story of Western’s birth, growth, and expansion is the story of commercial aviation in America.

“[A] menacingly illustrated book . . . nerdily gushes over the design and use of 130+ historical instruments of combat.” —Thrillist

One day a prehistoric guy picked up a rock and threw it at something. And the history of weapons began. Comedy writer and weapon nerd John O’Bryan relays the freaky highlights of man’s centuries-old obsession with weaponry. He hilariously explains the mace, the morning star, and the man catcher, while conveying factual information about each weapon: its history, uses, and badass potential. Looking through history’s highlights, readers will learn about Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and the “peaceful” Shaolin monks. This ultimate compendium of awesome weapons delivers all the surprisingly true details sure to impress anybody who’s ever made a gun with their fingers and said, “PEW-PEW-PEW!”

“[A] comic breakdown of weaponry.” —Lost in a Supermarket

Napoleonic-era accounts of life aboard Royal Navy warships: “Readers of Patrick O’Brian and C. S. Forester will enjoy this collection” (Library Journal).
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British Navy was the mightiest instrument of war the world had ever known. The Royal Navy patrolled the seas from India to the Caribbean, connecting an empire with footholds in every corner of the earth. Such a massive Navy required the service of more than 100,000 men—from officers to deckhands to surgeons. These are their stories. The inspiration for the bestselling novels by Patrick O’Brian and C. S. Forester, these memoirs and diaries, edited by Dean King, provide a true portrait of life aboard British warships during one of the most significant eras of world history. Their tellers are officers and ordinary sailors, and their subjects range from barroom brawls to the legendary heroics of Lord Horatio Nelson himself. Though these “iron men on wooden ships” are long gone, their deeds echo through the centuries.