Military history

  • Agent Zo

    £22.00

    This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo. Agent Zo was the only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and then in Britain she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the ‘Silent Unseen’. After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women’s agency in the Second World War.

  • The traitor of Arnhem

    £20.00

    The end of the Second World War is in sight. Following the Western Allies’ overwhelming victory on D-Day, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are all prepared to shape the future, and Operation Market Garden is Britain’s attempt to beat the Russians to Berlin and be the first to help craft the new world order.With 10,000 men dropped into Arnhem and another 20,000 in Grave, the British are set to secure the area and declare victory. However, Dutch resistance hero Christian Lindemans has other plans. Lindemans is determined to help the Germans gain the lead in the war and begins to dismantle the operation from within, betraying hundreds of Allied soldiers and changing the course of history forever. Drawn from unseen records, this is an epic story of secret missions, trust and treachery, bringing to light the murky story of one of the most influential spies of the 20th century.

  • SAS

    £10.99

    The authorised illustrated history of the SAS by the number one bestselling author of Dunkirk, Joshua Levine. With never-before-seen photographs and unheard stories, this is the SAS’s wartime history in vivid and astonishing detail.

  • Spies

    £12.99

    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.

  • The Eastern Front

    £30.00

    In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story of what Winston Churchill once called the ‘unknown war’: the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires. Much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, yet the Eastern Front was no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1917, huge numbers of people were killed, wounded or maimed in enormous battles that sometimes ranged across a front of 100 km in length. Through intimate eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany, and Italy, right through to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918.

  • Forgotten warriors

    £12.99

    From Boudicca to Ukraine, battlefields have always contained a surprising number of women. Tracing the long history of female fighters, ‘Forgotten Warriors’ puts the record straight, exploring how war became an all-male space, and getting to the bottom of why women were allowed to be astronauts a full thirty years before they were allowed to fight in combat. From the Mino, the all-female army that protected Dahomey from the West for two hundred years to the Night Witches, Soviet flying aces that decimated the Nazis; from the real story of Joan of Arc to the cross-dressing soldiers whose disguises were so effective the men around them never realized who they were fighting with, Sarah Percy shines a fascinating new light on the history of warfare.

  • The World War I book

    £19.99

    Discover the key battles, tactics, technologies and turning points of the First World War – the epic conflict that was supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars’. Combining authoritative, exciting text and bold explanatory graphics this title explores the historical background to the war, its causes, all of key events across the major theatres of conflict, and its aftermath. Using the original, graphic-led approach of the series, entries profile more than 90 of the key events during and surrounding the conflict – from the growing tensions between Europe’s major powers to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the German invasion of Belgium, the endless slaughter in the trenches, the American entry into the war, the Russian Revolution, the Armistice, and the creation of the League of Nations.

  • The doctor of Hiroshima

    £8.99

    With what this poor woman had been through the sight of her crying tore at my heartstrings. What if something should happen to her; who would care for her little baby? To conceal the fear and terror in my heart I left her, trying to put up a cheerful front. But no one could conceal from her the ominous import of the dark spots that had appeared on her chest. ‘The Doctor of Hiroshima’ is the extraordinary true story of Dr Michihiko Hachiya, whose hospital was less than a mile from the centre of the atomic bomb that hit on that warm August day. Somehow, in immense shock and pain and extremely weak, the doctor and his wife manage to drag themselves to the hospital, where their horrific wounds are treated, and they slowly begin to recover. Tentatively, the doctor starts to reckon with the utter devastation of the bomb, and to investigate the strange symptoms afflicting his patients.

  • SAS great escapes two

    £9.99

    ‘SAS Great Escapes Two’ recounts the hitherto untold stories of six of the most dramatic and daring escapes executed by the world’s most famous fighting force during WWII. From the very earliest SAS missions to the push into Nazi-occupied Europe, they cover some of the key figures in the Regiment, including its founder, David Stirling, plus other lesser-known heroes. With each story comes an edge-of-the-seat, rollercoaster ride in classic Damien Lewis fashion, as readers are plunged into the escapees’ experiences – sharing their most terrifying yet inspiring moments. These stunning accounts of survival beggar belief, revealing nerve-racking bluff and deception, knife-edge encounters with enemy hunter forces hellbent on wreaking vengeance and murder, but also incredible acts of mercy and kindness from those who risk all to help the escapees on their way.

  • The red hotel

    £12.99

    In ‘The Red Hotel’, former Daily Telegraph Foreign Editor and Russian expert Alan Philps sets out the way Stalin created his own reality by constraining and muzzling the British and American reporters covering the Eastern front during the war and forcing them to reproduce Kremlin propaganda. War correspondents were both bullied and pampered in a gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators and to share their beds. While some of these translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were brave secret dissenters who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Here, the story of the role of the women of the Metropol Hotel and the foreign reporters they worked with is told.

  • Iron and blood

    £18.99

    For most of its existence German-speaking Europe has been splintered into innumerable states – some substantial (such as Austria and Prussia) and some consisting of just a few Alpine meadows. Its military experience has also been extraordinarily varied: threatened and threatening; a mere buffer-zone, and a global threat. ‘Iron and Blood’ is a startlingly ambitious and absorbing book. It encompasses five centuries of political, military, technological and economic change to tell the story of the German-speaking lands, from the Rhine to the Balkan frontier, from Switzerland to the North Sea. Wilson’s narrative considers everything from weapons development to recruitment to battlefield strategy.

  • The search

    £10.99

    In 2016, archaeologist John Henry Phillips was volunteering with a charity that took D-Day veterans back to Normandy. Due to an administrative error he found himself without a hotel room and reliant on the generosity of one of the veterans who had a spare bed. That veteran was Patrick Thomas – it was an encounter that would change both their lives forever. Patrick’s landing craft, LCH 185, had led the first wave into Sword Beach on D-Day, and stayed off Normandy until the 25th June when an acoustic mine sent it to the seabed along with most of the crew. His story transfixed John, and the resulting search for the shipwreck was to consume him. Jumping back and forwards in time, between vivid descriptions of 19-year-old Patrick’s final days on board LCH 185 and John’s thrilling search to find the shipwreck, ‘The Search’ is an emotional story of a devastating time in history.