'When the Nazi power was broken, I asked myself what was the best advice I could give to my fellow citizens here in this island and across the channel in our ravaged continent. There was no difficulty in answering the question. My counsel to Europe can be given in a single word: Unite!'Sir Winston Churchill in 1947After the Second World War, with Europe in ruins, the victorious Winston Churchill swore to build a peace that would last.Together with a group of thinkers and politicians, Churchill began to build the institutions and the political will that would eventually lead to what we now know as the European Union.He believed in a united Europe, and wanted Britain to play a leading role. This book, based in part on new evidence, reveals his vision: Britain as a leading member of the European family. On the 23rd June this book asks us all to think carefully: what would Churchill have done?

Threads of Empire examines how Russia's imperial officials and intellectual elites made and maintained their authority among the changing intellectual and political currents in Eurasia from the mid-16th century to the revolution of 1917. The book focuses on a region 750 miles east of Moscow known as Bashkiria. The region was split nearly evenly between Russian and Turkic language speakers, both nomads and farmers. Ufa province at Bashkiria's core had the largest Muslim population of any province in the empire. The empire's leading Muslim official, the mufti, was based there, but the region also hosted a Russian Orthodox bishop. Bashkirs and peasants had different legal status, and powerful Russian Orthodox and Muslim nobles dominated the peasant estate. By the 20th century, industrial mining and rail commerce gave rise to a class structure of workers and managers. Bashkiria thus presents a fascinating case study of empire in all its complexities and of how the tsarist empire's ideology and categories of rule changed over time.

In the two hundred years since the Battle of Waterloo countless studies examining almost every aspect of this momentous event have been published - narratives of the campaign, graphic accounts of key stages in the fighting or of the role played by a regiment or by an individual who was there - an eyewitness. But what has not been written is an in-depth study of a division, one of the larger formations that made up the armies on that decisive battlefield, and that is exactly the purpose of Philip Haythornthwaite's original and highly readable new book. He concentrates on the famous Fifth Division, commanded by Sir Thomas Picton, which was a key element in Wellington's Reserve. The experiences of this division form a microcosm of those of the entire army. Vividly, using a range of first-hand accounts, the author describes the actions of the officers and men throughout this short, intense campaign, in particular their involvement the fighting at Quatre Bras and at Waterloo itself.

"Catherine Exley was born in Leeds in 1779. Aged thirty, she boarded a ship and sailed for Portugal. Her memoir of the years she spent following the 34th Regiment is unique, the only first-hand account of the Peninsular War by the wife of a common British soldier. Published shortly after her death as a booklet which has since been lost, Catherine s Diary survived in a local newspaper of 1923 to be rediscovered by her great-great-great-grandson. It is difficult today to comprehend the hardships Catherine endured: of her twelve children, three died as infants while with her on the march; her clothes, covered with filth and vermin, often went unchanged for weeks at a time, and she herself more than once almost died from illness and starvation; shocked at the mutilation inflicted by muskets and cannons, she still had the composure to manhandle blackened corpses upon a battlefield in search of her missing husband when hardened soldiers could no longer stomach the task. Her diary is reproduced here along with chapters which bear upon Catherine s experiences in Spain and Portugal, and which put her life and writings in their social context.""