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Charles Dickens
The celebrated works of Charles Dickens are read and loved around the globe. But who was the man behind the stories? And how did his turbulent personal life contribute to his literary genius? Separated from his family at the age of twelve after his father was sent to...
Bloomsbury Women
With their wild Bohemian exploits and exceptional artistic talent, the lives of the infamous Bloomsbury Set have long captured the imagination of the public. Equally as legendary for their scandalous affairs and progressive attitudes as they were for their...
Stalin in Power
'This is the best book about Stalin that has ever been written and one that is not likely to be superseded in the foreseeable future' — W. Bruce Lincoln, Chicago Tribune In 1929, Stalin plunged Soviet Russia into a coercive "revolution from above", a decade-long...
Scramble
'A many-sided picture of war.' The New York Times 1940. Britain stands alone against Nazi Germany. Only the RAF can protect Britain from falling to the Germans. Scramble is the thrilling story of the epic battle that turned the tide of Nazi invasion in the summer of...
Greed in the Gilded Age
Greed in the Gilded Age is a Gatsby-esque tale of mystery, money, sex, and scandal. ‘Millionaire’ had just entered the American lexicon and Cassie Chadwick was front page news, becoming a media sensation before mass media, even eclipsing President Roosevelt’s...
King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose
The rising of the Mary Rose in 1982 made headlines across the globe The iconic ship was a key vessel in the startlingly rapid evolution of the wooden battleship as a floating gun platform. After thirty-four years’ military service, Henry VIII’s revolutionary flagship...
The Terror Before Trafalgar
The Royal Navy’s annihilation of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 was a pivotal event in European history. Because the victory was so stunningly complete, and because Admiral Horatio Nelson died heroically in the engagement, the event has...
A Family Torn Apart
Angie, 6, and sister Polly, 4, are utterly distraught when they arrive to stay with foster carer Cathy Glass. Their older half-sister Ashleigh has accused their father of something horrible, and the two young sisters have been removed from home to keep them safe....
The Greatest Day in History
‘This volume sets an example that will be hard to equal’ - Daily Mail On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, after a dramatic week of negotiations and military offensives, the gunfire officially ceased. The Great War was over. The...
War Beneath the Sea
The first book to cover the major submarine campaigns in all the WWII theatres. The canvas is broad and deep, from the strategic perspective at the top to the cramped and claustrophobic life of the crews in their submersible steel tubes; from the feats of ‘ace’...
Coral Sea 1942
In May 1942, the Americans discovered the Japanese planned to take Port Moresby in New Guinea. After suffering a devastating series of setbacks after Pearl Harbour, it was vital that US forces prevent another loss. Admiral Frank Fletcher was dispatched with two navy...
The Granny Who Stands on Her Head
“Somewhere in the middle of my seventies, I realised that I liked being old.” So begins this set of engaging stories and thoughts on growing older by someone with a vast range of life experience to share. Part memoir and part reflection on the joys and challenges of...
Deer Man
For readers of Fox & I comes “a fable very much for our time.”—The TIMES “Unusual and fascinating... Read this book and enter into another world."— Jane Goodall In this sensuous and moving memoir, a young man forms a powerful connection with deer while living alone in...
The Bismarck Episode
May 1941. British morale was low. The sinking of the Bismarck was a matter of life and death. But before the British could engage her, they had to find her. The British Admiralty received a report that two large German warships had been seen steaming northward through...
Operation Watchtower
“A terrific read about the pivotal battle on Guadalcanal.” – Reviewer A powerful account of the tide turning WW2 Pacific Theater campaign. In the height of the second world war, US forces launched a long and gruelling campaign to take the island of Guadalcanal,...
Adventurous Women Throughout History
Did you know that Nellie Bly pretended to be insane so that she would be admitted into a women's lunatic asylum? She put herself in peril to expose the unfair, inhumane treatment the patients endured in the facility. Because of her selfless actions, her government...
Metternich: The First European
While the European Union is a relatively new phenomenon, it is not a new idea. Klemens von Metternich - the statesman who destroyed Napoleon and directed Habsburg Austria’s policy for nearly forty years - tried, in the nineteenth century, to build his own form of...
Cassino
Winter, 1944. The Allied Forces are driving through Italy. But about halfway between Naples and Rome, the Germans resolved to stop the enemy advance in its tracks. The place the Germans had chosen for this stand was Monte Cassino.Over the next few months it was to...
The Long Farewell
Winner of NSW Premier’s Literary Award During the nineteenth century more than a million people, many of whom had never ventured beyond their homes in Britain, sailed to the new colonies of Australia. On their months-long voyage the emigrants lived in a state of limbo...
Suez: The Forgotten Invasion
One of the most significant events in British history, the Suez Crisis heralded the end of the British Empire. When Britain joined forces with France and Israel to invade Egypt in an attempt to regain control of the Suez Canal from President Nasser in 1956, the...
Alamein
The Battle of El Alamein in 1942 brought a sense of victory to a Britain grown weary from defeat. And it was a decisive victory. The Eighth Army ended the see-saw desert campaign and drove the German–Italian Panzer Army across Egypt and Libya, and into Tunisia. There...
The Gestapo
From 1933 to 1945, the Gestapo was Nazi Germany's chief instrument of counter-espionage, political suppression, and terror. Jacques Delarue, a saboteur arrested by the Nazis in occupied France, chronicles how the land of Beethoven elevated sadism to a fine art. The...
Trafalgar
Two hundred years ago Napoleon Bonaparte planned to lead his Grande Armée to Britain, the only country still defying him. From Bonaparte’s headquarters to the admirals’ flagships, from William Pitt and his volunteers on the English coast to the lower decks of the...
Coconut
‘Why am I not white like everybody else?’ Nan came and sat on the edge of my bed. ‘What do you mean?’ A tender finger brushed against my cheek. ‘Well, everyone in this house is white. Why am I Black?’ A generation of Nigerian children were born in Britain in the...
The Making of Eastern Europe
The characteristics of Eastern Europe as we know it today were formed long before the Soviet Union came into existence. In searching for the origins of Eastern Europe’s difficulty in adapting to democracy, this sweeping history ranges from the present day to the time...
Warlords
Warlords recreates in forensic and gripping detail the extraordinary mind games between Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt as World War Two unfolded day by day. In a unique combination of innovative style and thorough scholarship, Warlords tells the story of...
The Haldeman Diaries
“Because history is more art than science, it is remembered now only as it was chronicled then; this unfortunately is not always as it actually happened.” Following his election as the 37th President of the United States in November 1968, Richard Nixon chose H. R....
The Rise and Fall of Stalin
This is the story of modern history’s most treacherous and terrifying dictator. Stalin was a man of many facets: he studied for the priesthood, he was a romantic poet, a bank-robber, an assassin, a revolutionary, a ruthless leader, and, for a time, one of the two most...
Tanks for the Memories
Aaron Elson attended a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which his father served in World War II, a few years after his father's death. He returned two reunions later, in 1989, with a tape recorder, and has been preserving the stories of World War II veterans...
Outsider Agent
Anthony Arismendi moved to the United States from Venezuela as a teenager in the mid-seventies with the dream of becoming a US citizen and an FBI agent—despite the fact that he couldn’t speak a word of English. Transplanted from the dangerous streets of Caracas,...
Scottish History: Strange but True
This book contains hundreds of ‘strange but true’ stories about Scottish history. Arranged into a miniature history of Scotland, and with bizarre and hilarious true tales for every era, it will delight anyone with an interest in Scotland’s past.
The Underground Railroad
"The Underground Railroad" chronicles the stories and methods of some 649 slaves who escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Author, William Still included his carefully compiled and detailed documentation about those that he had helped escape into the pages...
Gallipoli 1915
Why was the Allied naval assault of 1915 such a failure? Did the Ottoman Turks know about the Allied landings? And did Sir Ian Hamilton, the overall commander of the Allied forces at Gallipoli, really blunder by intervening at Suvla?These questions, and the key issue...
Boys of Winter
“An immensely valuable and substantial addition to 10th Mountain literature and to the history of skiing in the United States.” — International Ski History Association The Boys of Winter tells the true story of three young American ski champions and their brutal,...
What They Didn’t Burn
What if you uncovered a Nazi paper trail that revealed your father to be a man very different from the quiet, introspective dad you knew . . . or thought you knew? Growing up, author Mel Laytner saw his father as a quintessential Type B: passive and conventional. As...
The Far Side of Paradise
The seminal biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Far Side of Paradise was the first ever biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, widely acclaimed as a sensitive, scholarly appraisal of the writer’s life and work. With this revised edition, updated to include new...