Showing 169–180 of 229 resultsSorted by latest
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£18.99
This is the definitive biography of the greatest French statesman of modern times. In six weeks in the early summer of 1940, France was over-run by German troops and quickly surrendered. The French government of Marshal Pétain sued for peace and signed an armistice. One little-known junior French general, refusing to accept defeat, made his way to England. On 18th June he spoke to his compatriots over the BBC, urging them to rally to him in London. ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered into history.
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£20.00
The enthralling true story of the curious life and career of Maud West, one of Britain’s first and best-known female detectives.
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£14.99
Between January and July 1919, after the war to end all wars, men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the Peace Conference. For six extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of world government as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. ‘Paris 1919’ offers a prismatic view of the moment when much of the modern world was first sketched out.
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£25.00
The four Olivier sisters were emancipated, determined and wild in an age when society punished women for being so. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge at a time when education was still thought to be damaging to ovaries. There they met Rupert Brooke and formed the Neo Pagans, initiating a web of entanglements that would challenge even the sisters’ unbreakable bond. Daphne later became a pioneering educationalist, and set up Britain’s first Steiner school, and Noel joined a tiny minority of female doctors before the First World War.
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£11.99
On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying. Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of espionage, betrayal and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever.
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£10.99
The British fascination with heroic failure has clouded the story of Arnhem in myths. Antony Beevor, using often overlooked sources from Dutch, British, American, Polish and German archives, has reconstructed the terrible reality of the fighting, which General Student himself called ‘The Last German Victory’. Yet this work, written in Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single, dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war.
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£10.99
Presents the adventures and tribulations of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children.
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£18.99
After visiting Japan in 1902 and 1907 and discovering two magnificent cherry trees in the garden of his family home in Kent in 1919, Collingwood Ingram fell in love with cherry blossoms, and dedicated much of his life to their cultivation and preservation. On a 1926 trip to Japan to search for new specimens, Ingram was shocked to see the loss of local cherry diversity, driven by modernisation, neglect and a dangerous and creeping ideology. The most striking absence from the Japanese cherry scene, for Ingram, was that of Taihaku, a brilliant ‘great white’ cherry tree. Multiple attempts to send Taihaku scions back to Japan ended in failure. Over decades, Ingram became one of the world’s leading cherry experts and shared the joy of sakura both nationally and internationally. This book presents a portrait of this little-known Englishman.
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£30.00
We think we know ancient Greece, the civilisation that shares the same name and gave us just about everything that defines ‘western’ culture today, in the arts, sciences, social sciences and politics. Yet, as Greece has been brought under repeated scrutiny during the financial crises that have convulsed the country since 2010, worldwide coverage has revealed just how poorly we grasp the modern nation. Roderick Beaton sets out to understand the modern Greeks on their own terms. How did Greece come to be so powerfully attached to the legacy of the ancients in the first place, and then define an identity for themselves that is at once Greek and modern? This title reveals the remarkable achievement, during the last 300 years, of building a modern nation on, sometimes literally, the ruins of a vanished civilisation.
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£9.99
The story of a man’s search for the astonishing truth about his family’s past. The last time Lien saw her parents was in the Hague when she was collected at the door by a stranger and taken to a city far away to be hidden from the Nazis. She was raised by her foster family as one of their own, but a falling out well after the war meant they were no longer in touch. What was her side of the story, Bart van Es – a grandson of the couple who looked after Lien – wondered? What really happened during the war, and after? So began an investigation that would consume and transform both Bart van Es’s life and Lien’s. Lien was now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam. Reluctantly, she agreed to meet him, and eventually they struck up a remarkable friendship.
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£16.99
Ever since the Ottoman Empire was defeated and British colonial rule began in 1917, Jews and Arabs have struggled for control of the Holy Land. Israel’s independence in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust was a triumph for the Zionist movement but a catastrophe – ‘nakba’ in Arabic – for the native Palestinian majority. Ian Black has written a gripping, lucid and timely account of what was doomed to be an irreconcilably hostile relationship from the beginning. He traces how, half a century after the watershed of the 1967 war, hopes for a two-state solution and an end to occupation have all but disappeared. The author, a veteran Guardian journalist, draws on deep knowledge of the region and decades of his own reporting to create a uniquely vivid and valuable book. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the story so far – and why both peoples face an uncertain future.
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£16.99
Like its predecessor, this title offers nothing less than a history of the world from Stalin’s desk. It is also, like the previous volume, a landmark achievement in the annals of the biographer’s art. Kotkin’s portrait captures the vast structures moving global events, and the intimate details of decision-making.
