The consummate soldier of Wellington's Peninsular Army
Guernsey born John Gaspard Le Marchant was an intellectual born before his time. He had a gift for languages, was a competent musician and a talented water colourist. Nevertheless, he chose a career as a soldier and cavalryman, perhaps unusually, since cavalry officers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were not noted for their intellect. In common with many officers who were associated with the Duke of Wellington in the battles against Napoleon's First Empire, Le Marchant first saw action against the French Revolutionary armies in the Low Countries. The campaign was a debacle, but it caused Le Marchant to consider the formation, drill, equipment and tactical methods employed by the British army in the field, and resulted in his authorship of a number of important treatises on these subjects. These works were particularly well received by the Duke of York and this led to royal patronage and the adoption of several Le Marchant's ideas. His greatest achievement was certainly the creation of the Royal Military College, and his vision of a training school for military officers gave rise not only to Sandhurst, but also West Point and a number of other institutions created on his model internationally. His promotion to major-general excluded him from academic life and he was given command of a brigade of heavy cavalry in the Peninsular War, where he was, predictably, as effective in the field as he was in all his endeavours. Le Marchant fell, sabre in hand among enemy ranks, at the Battle of Salamanca having instituted a brilliant manoeuvre of cavalry which almost certainly sealed what is recognised as one of Wellington's greatest victories. This biography of by Le Marchant's son is accompanied in this special Leonaur edition by a short biography of Le Marchant's military career by historian, John William Cole.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

An instant bestseller when it was first published in 1946, this memoir recounts the author's nearly forty years of service in naval intelligence, beginning in 1908. One of the first to venture into the realm of psychological warfare, Ellis Zacharias was awarded the Legion of Merit with two gold stars for his contributions. Among the highlights of his impressive career was the role he played in convincing the Japanese to accept surrender in 1945, a subject he deals with in fascinating detail in this book. Zacharias gives readers access to rare psychological profiles that he prepared for the Office of Naval Intelligence on leading political and military figures in Japan. His book also recounts his exploits as a young naval attache with the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo in the early 1920s. In the early months of the war readers join him in the thick of combat in the Pacific, first aboard a cruiser under his command and later in a battleship. Of particular interest are descriptions of his one-man radio broadcasts beamed at Japan between V-E and V-J days that received kudos from Adm. Ernest J. King for helping bring about the surrender.

Seventy years after the establishment of Rhodesia by the European settlers, a little girl was born to an activist. Her father fought to establish a one man, one vote system. He was arrested and imprisoned for ten years. The girl was ecstatic to have her father back until she realized that he had become a stranger to her. My Father before Me is a vivid journey through Catherine Kanhema-Blinston's early life. It chronicles her life in the midst of poverty, war, and prison camps. Her happiest moments during her childhood were the fun, light-hearted times she shared with her big family and the bonds she formed with her siblings during her outdoor adventures. These pleasant memories create a sharp contrast to the instability faced by a young girl growing up as a political activist's daughter.

Shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize 2022 for Nature Writing - Highly Commended Winner for the Richard Jefferies Award 2021 for Best Nature Writing 'A rural, working-class writer in an all too rarefied field, Chester's work is unusual for depicting the countryside as it is lived on the economic margins.' The Guardian 'An important portrait of connection to the land beyond ownership or possession.' Raynor Winn 'It's ever so good. Political, passionate and personal.' Robert Macfarlane 'Evocative and inspiring...environmental protest, family, motherhood and...nature.' Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, Costa Novel Award Winner 2021 Nature is everything. It is the place I come from and the place I got to. It is family. Wherever I am, it is home and away, an escape, a bolt hole, a reason, a place to fight for, a consolation, and a way home. As a child growing up in rural England, Guardian Country Diarist Nicola Chester was inexorably drawn to the natural landscape surrounding her. Walking, listening and breathing in the nature around her, she followed the call of the cuckoo, the song of the nightingale and watched as red kites, fieldfares and skylarks soared through the endless skies over the chalk hills of the North Wessex Downs: the ancient land of Greenham Common which she called home. Nicola bears witness to, and fights against, the stark political and environmental changes imposed on the land she loves, whilst raising her family to appreciate nature and to feel like they belong - core parts of who Nicola is. From protesting the loss of ancient trees to the rewilding of Greenham Common, to the gibbet on Gallows Down and living in the shadow of Highclere Castle (made famous in Downton Abbey), On Gallows Down shows how one woman made sense of her world - and found her place in it.

A "New York Times "bestseller, Jeff Guinn's definitive, myth-busting account of the most famous gunfight in American history reveals who Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons and McLaurys really were and what the shootout was all about.
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, a confrontation between eight armed men erupted in a deadly shootout. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral would shape how future generations came to view the Old West. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons became the stuff of legends, symbolic of a frontier populated by good guys in white hats and villains in black ones. It's a colorful story--but the truth is even better.
Drawing on new material from private collections--including diaries, letters, and Wyatt Earp's own hand-drawn sketch of the shootout's conclusion--as well as archival research, Jeff Guinn gives us a startlingly different and far more fascinating picture of what actually happened that day in Tombstone and why

Samuel Pepys began his celebrated diary in 1660, at the age of 26, as a young and ambitious secretary. Due to his support of the king's restoration, he soon found himself in an influential position in the Royal Navy's administration. He was to keep the diary for nearly ten years, until his eye sight failed, and in it he would record many of the great events of the age, such as the outbreak of plague and the Great Fire of London, as well as many smaller, domestic and personal happenings. Although written in shorthand and principally for his own personal remembrance and pleasure, it is clear at times that Pepys had one eye on posterity. It is a large work, conveniently divided into one volume per year; here is the first, based on the first complete edition, that of Henry B. Wheatley, originally published in 1893.

Emma Goldman is one of the most celebrated activists and philosophers of the early 20th century, admired and reviled for her anarchist ideas and vociferous support of free speech and personal liberation. A polarizing figure in life, Emma Goldman was among the first advocates of birth control for women. From 1900 to 1920 she was in and out of jail in the United States on charges of illegally promoting contraception, inciting riots in favor of her social and economic causes, and discouraging potential recruits to avoid the draft for World War I. Although Goldman initially supported the Bolshevik Revolution, the resulting Soviet Union's repressiveness caused an abrupt reversal in her opinion. Goldman's narrative is thorough yet compelling; her childhood in Russia, her emigration to the USA as a teenager, and her attraction to anarchist and social causes is told.

In 1940 a first-year student at Oxford gave up his legal studies to serve his country in its time of need. He served with valour and distinction, receiving the Distinguished Service Cross for developing and then delivering battlewinning tactics that protected the flanks of the D-Day landings. But Guy Hudson also saw things that cannot be unseen, and experienced the horrors of war that become tattooed on one's soul. This is the story of a brave and patriotic sailor who helped sink the German battleship Bismarck, drove his Motor Torpedo Boat into enemy harbours right under the muzzles of Axis guns, and then pioneered radar control procedures for the small torpedo and gun boats that careered across pitch-dark maritime battlefields to guard the Allied landings in northern France. It is also the story of a man who turned to alcohol to control the darker memories created by war, and whose life and business collapsed due to the demon of drink, before he was rescued by his second wife. His legacy now lives on at the University of Oxford through the Guy Hudson Memorial Trust - this biography is his tribute.

The Revolutionary War is filled with stories of bravery, but many of its heroes have remained unknown. Major Philip Ulmer, captain of the gunboat "Spitfire," is one of those heroes. He first enlisted as a sergeant in the Massachusetts militia in 1775 and rose through the ranks through his exemplary leadership, courage and devotion to duty. He was involved in almost every major event in the North, including the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Siege of Boston, the Battle of Lake Champlain, the Penobscot Expedition and the battles at Trenton, Princeton and Saratoga. He served under the command of many well-known generals, including Washington, Lafayette, Arnold, Gates and Knox. After the war, Ulmer forged a business partnership with Knox in Lincolnville, Maine, and was an original founder of that town. He answered the call of duty again during the War of 1812 as an intelligence officer with the local militia defending Penobscot Bay. Discover this remarkable history of a long-overshadowed American hero.

The genial but troubled New Englander whose single-minded partisan loyalties inflamed the nation's simmering battle over slavery

Charming and handsome, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was drafted to break the deadlock of the 1852 Democratic convention. Though he seized the White House in a landslide against the imploding Whig Party, he proved a dismal failure in office.

Michael F. Holt, a leading historian of nineteenth-century partisan politics, argues that in the wake of the Whig collapse, Pierce was consumed by an obsessive drive to unify his splintering party rather than the roiling country. He soon began to overreach. Word leaked that Pierce wanted Spain to sell the slave-owning island of Cuba to the United States, rousing sectional divisions. Then he supported repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which limited the expansion of slavery in the west. Violence broke out, and "Bleeding Kansas" spurred the formation of the Republican Party. By the end of his term, Pierce's beloved party had ruptured, and he lost the nomination to James Buchanan.

In this incisive account, Holt shows how a flawed leader, so dedicated to his party and ill-suited for the presidency, hastened the approach of the Civil War.

They were the Tiger FACs, the forward air controllers who flew fast-moving F-4E Phantoms over the deadly skies of Laos and North Vietnam in an air war that history forgot to mention. These are their stories, in their own words, of missions in AAA-filled skies with supersonic angels as their wingmen. They challenged the enemy down in the weeds, eyeball-to-eyeball; cutting the supply lines that plunged through the mountains and karst formations of Laos on their way to South Vietnam. The mission required flying sorties up to six hours long with four to six air-to-air refuelings. It demanded extraordinary teamwork and bravery, and this small group of men paid the price, suffering up to eighty percent of the combat damage of a seventy-two aircraft wing. Their stories are often irreverent and far from today's political correctness, yet they are filled with the reality of war. "The Tiger FACs" will take you back to experience the days and nights of these fighter crews at Korat Air Base in Thailand. It is a recantation of the life and times of the men who chose to fly and fight, and while you won't experience battle damage, you will feel what they lived, and know, without doubt, that you are on their wing.