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‘An impressive audit of the monuments all around us and their often forgotten back-stories. A hundred individual histories, skillfully assembled, built into a poignant meditation on why they still matter.’ David Olusoga
Owain Mulligan was never what you’d call a career soldier. Nor even a particularly good one. At weekends he trained with the Territorial Army and dreamt of swapping the mayhem of teaching in a tough school for the adventure of service in Iraq. At least they’d let him wear a helmet in Iraq. But when the job in headquarters he’s been expecting doesn’t materialise, he finds himself on the streets of Basra during one of the most violent periods of the conflict. Between homicidal militias, a chain of command who seem determined to get him killed, and equipment which might well do it for them, he and his men have their work cut out. It certainly puts double geography with 9E into perspective. ‘The Accidental Soldier’ is a searingly honest and darkly funny account of what it was really like being in the British Army in Iraq (including all the bits they probably hoped you’d never find out).
One morning in December, Kyungha is called to her friend Inseon’s hospital bedside. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation following a wood-chopping accident, Inseon is bedridden and begs Kyungha to take the first plane to her home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, who will quickly die unless it receives food. Unfortunately, as Kyungha arrives a snowstorm hits. Lost in a world of snow, she begins to wonder if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. But she doesn’t yet suspect the darkness which awaits her at her friend’s house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive, documenting the terrible massacre seventy years before that saw 30,000 Jeju civilians murdered.
The definitive account of the Tokyo war crimes trials of 1946-8 and the impact the settlement has had on post-war China and Japan, and on the wider the world right up to the present day.
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? International Booker Prize winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: How could this massacre have happened? How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power.
A moving account of how and why the tomb of the Unknown Warrior came about, by best-selling author and ex-serviceman John Nichol.Â
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, journalist Andrew North arrived in Afghanistan for the first time. Meanwhile, the lives of five young Afghans were about to change forever: Farzana had been banned from attending school as a child, but education would take her further than she could have imagined. Bilal’s dream of becoming a journalist was about to come true, but it would also expose him to untold danger. Abdul was on the cusp of finally becoming a doctor after his studies were delayed by years of war. Jahan’s shoe-shine business was beginning to take a completely unexpected turn. And Naqibullah’s life in a quiet province was soon to be shattered by the arrival of Western forces. ‘War & Peace & War’ tells their stories, and those of many others North came to know over twenty years.
In an eerie replay of the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in 1842, coalition troops withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of military campaigning. The subsequent collapse of the Afghan government and its army shocked the world, as a resurgent Taliban gathered its forces and swept across the country. Thousands of Afghans who had worked with the allies were left to the meagre mercy of the Taliban. As the Taliban went door to door to execute ‘collaborators’, a small international task force set out on a daring mission to evacuate as many Afghans and their families as possible. Drawing on a wide range of first-hand accounts ‘Escape from Kabul’ is the harrowing true story of Operation Pitting and the Kabul airlift.
The astonishing story of the ejection seat and the pilots who have had to rely on it
The riveting story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China. Espionage, election meddling, disinformation, assassinations, subversion, and sabotage – all attract headlines today about Putin’s dictatorship. But they are far from new. The West has a long-term Russia problem, not a Putin problem. ‘Spies’ presents secret archives and exclusive interviews with former agents to tell the history of the war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century.
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