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The history of Germany is intricately woven. Threaded in time through its struggles and triumphs with religion, industrialisation, enlightenment, politics, unification, and war. In ‘A Brief History of Germany’, Jeremy Black questions how the Germany we know today came to be, chronicling the events that shaped its past, present and future in a fascinating new way.
The Battle for the Falklands is a vivid chronicle of the political decision-making and military strategy during the Falklands conflict.
1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. Its events reverberated throughout the rest of the 20th century and still affect us today, 100 years later. Empires fell. In the USA, Prohibition was at its height. The Hollywood film industry, although rocked by a series of scandals, continued to grow. A new mass medium – radio – was making its presence felt and, in Britain, the BBC was founded. The Roaring Twenties had begun to roar and the Jazz Age had arrived. In a sequence of vividly written sketches, Nick Rennison conjures up all the drama and diversity of an extraordinary year.
This was a time of blitzkrieg and the Blitz; of the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk. From the fighting in Finland to the destruction of Coventry, from the sinking of the French fleet in Oran to the invasion of Norway, this is history at its most extraordinary and engaging. By recounting major episodes from the viewpoint of those actually involved, Collier provides enlightening glimpses of just what war represented to both the great and to the unknown, and reveals that while 1940 was a year of incredible folly, it was also a time of inestimable bravery.
We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But this is wrong. Science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavour. Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts. When Newton set out the laws of motion, he relied on astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopaedia. And when Einstein was studying quantum mechanics, he was inspired by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose. ‘Horizons’ pushes beyond Europe, exploring the ways in which scientists from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific fit into the history of science, and arguing that it is best understood as a story of global cultural exchange.
Across the whole of Nazi-ruled Europe the experience of occupation was sharply varied. Some countries – such as Denmark – were allowed to run themselves within tight limits. Others – such as France – were constrained not only by military occupation but by open collaboration. In a historical moment when Nazi victory seemed permanent and irreversible, the question ‘why resist?’ was therefore augmented by ‘who was the enemy?’. ‘Resistance’ is an extraordinarily powerful, humane and haunting account of how and why all across Nazi-occupied Europe some people decided to resist the Third Reich.
In the first decades of the 20th century, five women – Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood, and Barbara Freire-Marreco – arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms – yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them. Frances Larson’s masterful group biography is a revelatory portrait of five hidden heroines of British scholarship.
An ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic living quietly in Somerset, Stephen Rose has just begun to form a bond with the daughter he barely knows when he receives a summons – to an inquiry into an incident during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is the return of what Stephen hoped he had outdistanced. Above all, to testify would jeopardise the fragile relationship with his daughter. And if he loses her, he loses everything. Instead, he decides to write her an account of his life; a confession, a defence, a love letter. Also a means of buying time. But time is running out, and the day comes when he must face again what happened in that faraway summer of 1982.
A gripping narrative of the intertwined lives of the four philosophers whose ideas reshaped the 20th century.
Critically acclaimed, this unique and compelling personal biography uncovers the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author’s grandparents.
The best way to understand what it was like to fight in the Second World War is to see it through the eyes of the soldiers who fought it. The South Notts Hussars fought at almost every major battle of the Second World War, from the Siege of Tobruk to the Battle of El Alamein and the D-Day Landings. Here, Peter Hart draws on detailed interviews conducted with members of the regiment, to provide both a comprehensive account of the conflict and reconstruct its most thrilling moments in the words of the men who experienced it. This is military history at its best: outlining the path from despair to victory, and allowing us to share in soldiers’ hopes and fears; the deafening explosions of the shells, the scream of the diving Stukas and the wounded; the pleasures of good comrades and the devastating despair at lost friends.
An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence from Ramachandra Guha.
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