Willie Steyn, the author, was one of six hundred Boer prisoners sent by ship to the island of Ceylon to be interned in the Diyatalawa prisoner-of-war camp during the Anglo-Boer War. While their ship was anchored in Colombo harbour on a dark, moonless night, Steyn and four of his fellow prisoners lowered themselves into the sea, each waiting until his predecessor had got away undetected by the guards on board and in vessels patrolling around the ship.

The charm of Steyn’s personal account of his adventures lies in its understatement and its matter-of-fact simplicity. He does not portray himself as a hero, nor does he lay any claim to fame, but his account gathers intensity and force as the story progresses. Willie Steyn was intent on escape from the moment he was taken into captivity, and the reader experiences a corresponding intensity, encountering Willie as a free spirit throughout his captivity and his protracted journey home.

Deneys Reitz – author of Commando and well known for his own bravery – called Steyn ‘one of our bravest men’, and described Steyn’s escape as ''a deed that is in my opinion without equal in the history of escape.''

In a time of rampant imperialism, feisty Judith Armstrong is determined to fight for the rights of impoverished women in a masculine world - that is until a demonstration deteriorates into a riot, bringing her into conflict with Ralph Gilchrist, a well-born officer in Her Majesty’s Dragoon Guards. Judith’s spirited approach to Women’s Rights and freedom inevitably clashes with Ralph’s decidedly conservative and typically Victorian views. Sparks fly, but despite their mutual attraction, scandal forces her to leave Britain for a mission station in the British colony of Natal. Britain is struggling to maintain its empire in the face of the demands of a growing democracy at home and the rising powers of Germany, America and Russia abroad. These tensions are set to play out in southern Africa, where diamonds have been discovered and it has suddenly become that much more important to cement the Empire’s hold on the territory. In the fledgling colony of Natal, a power struggle between the British and the Zulu Kingdom grows, and it is here that Judith and Ralph are destined to meet again - but this time on the blood-soaked battlefields of Zululand at the fateful Battle of Isandlwana. This then is their story... a story of young South Africa and of the clash between an aging empire and the mighty Zulu tribe. A story of adventure, glorious bravery, earth-shattering defeat and a love that could never be.

In Rwanda in 1994, five out of six Tutsis (800,000) were hacked to death with machetes by their Hutu neighbours. In the villages of Nyamata and N'tarama, where, in the first two days of the genocide, over 10,000 Tutsis were massacred in the churches where they sought refuge, Jean Hatzfeld interviewed some of the survivors.Of all ages, coming from different walks of life, from orphan teenage farmers to the local social worker, fourteen survivors talk of the genocide, the death of family and friends in the church and in the marshes of Bugesera to which they fled. They also talk of their present life and try to explain and understand the reasons behind the extermination. These horrific accounts of life at the very edge contrast with Hatzfeld's own sensitive and vivid descriptions of Rwanda's villages and countryside in peacetime. "Into the Quick of Life" brings us, in the author's own words, 'as close to (the event) as we can ever get'. It is a unique insight into a genocide.

This critique of the ANC and the liberation struggle in South Africa challenges conventional public perceptions of the organization and its rise to power. It maintains that the ANC failed to stay in touch with the South African masses and made fundamental compromises to gain political power.

The horrors and tragedies of the First World War produced some of the finest literature of the century: including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Goodbye to All That; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; and the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Collectively detailing every campaign and action, together with the emotions and motives of the men on the ground, these 'war books' are the most important set of sources on the Great War that we have. Through looking at the war poems, memoirs and accounts published after the First World War, Ian Andrew Isherwood addresses the key issues of wartime historiography-patriotism, cowardice, publishers and their motives, readers and their motives, masculinity and propaganda. He also analyses the culture, society and politics of the world left behind. Remembering the Great War is a valuable, fascinating and stirring addition to our knowledge of the experiences of WWI.

This stirring account of the tragic civil war in Sudan, as endured by the Nuba people of central Sudan, is more than just a skillful journalist's firsthand report on the human consequences of that war. Based on repeated visits to Sudan from 1998 through 2004, "War and Faith in Sudan" leads to a deeper understanding of the cultural, racial, and religious fault lines dividing people all over the world today. Gabriel Meyer merges a veteran war correspondent's unflinching vision with a poet's ability to see beneath the surface. Forty-four striking photographs by James Nicholls put a human face on the tragedy of modern Sudan. Meyer and Nicholls together offer a riveting personal view of current events with an eye to universal themes. The insights and images of "War and Faith in Sudan", a landmark work, will make a lasting impact on everyone who ponders them.

On October 11th, 1899 long-simmering tensions between Britain and the Boer Republics - the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic - finally erupted into the conflict that would become known as the Second Boer War. Two days after the first shots were fired, a young writer by the name of Winston Churchill set out for South Africa to cover the conflict for the Morning Post. The Boer War brings together the two collections of despatches that Churchill published on the conflict. London to Ladysmith recounts the future Prime Minister's arrival in South Africa and his subsequent capture by and dramatic escape from the Boers, the adventure that first brought the name of Winston Churchill to public attention. Ian Hamilton's March collects Churchill's later despatches as he marched alongside a column of the main British army from Bloemfontein to Pretoria. Published together, these books are a vivid eye-witness account of a landmark period in British Imperial History and an insightful chronicle of a formative experience by Britain's greatest war-time leader.

This work addresses a central but often ignored question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: how did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a civilizing ideology with distinct racist overtones? By focusing on a particular group of colonial officials in a specific setting the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to 1930 the author argues that the ideal of a special civilizing mission had a decisive impact on colonial policymaking and on the evolution of modern French republicanism generally. French ideas of civilization simultaneously republican, racist, and modern encouraged the governors general in the 1890 s to attack such feudal African institutions as aristocratic rule and slavery in ways that referred back to France s own experience of revolutionary change. Ironically, local administrators in the 1920 s also invoked these same ideas to justify such reactionary policies as the reintroduction of forced labor, arguing that coercion, which inculcated a work ethic in the lazy African, legitimized his loss of freedom. By constantly invoking the ideas of civilization, colonial policy makers in Dakar and Paris managed to obscure the fundamental contradictions between the rights of man guaranteed in a republican democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire that violates those rights.