The rough-hewn general who rose to the nation's highest office, and whose presidency witnessed the first political skirmishes that would lead to the Civil War

Zachary Taylor was a soldier's soldier, a man who lived up to his nickname, "Old Rough and Ready." Having risen through the ranks of the U.S. Army, he achieved his greatest success in the Mexican War, propelling him to the nation's highest office in the election of 1848. He was the first man to have been elected president without having held a lower political office.

John S. D. Eisenhower, the son of another soldier-president, shows how Taylor rose to the presidency, where he confronted the most contentious political issue of his age: slavery. The political storm reached a crescendo in 1849, when California, newly populated after the Gold Rush, applied for statehood with an anti- slavery constitution, an event that upset the delicate balance of slave and free states and pushed both sides to the brink. As the acrimonious debate intensified, Taylor stood his ground in favor of California's admission--despite being a slaveholder himself--but in July 1850 he unexpectedly took ill, and within a week he was dead. His truncated presidency had exposed the fateful rift that would soon tear the country apart.

Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot.

Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I & VI, warding off military and religious threats and steering the decisions of two very different but equally wilful and hard-to-manage monarchs. The promising son of Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Burghley, for Cecil there was no choice but politics, and he became supremely skilled in the arts of power, making many rivals and enemies.

All His Spies is a wonderfully engaging and original work of history. Many readers are familiar with the great events of this tumultuous time, but All His Spies shows how easily these dramas could have turned out very differently. Cecil’s sureness of purpose, his espionage network and good luck all conspired to keep England uninvaded and to create a new ‘British’ monarchy which has endured to the present day.

Malalai Joya was named one of "Time "magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2010. An extraordinary young woman raised in the refugee camps of Iran and Pakistan, Joya became a teacher in secret girls' schools, hiding her books under her burqa so the Taliban couldn't find them; she helped establish a free medical clinic and orphanage in her impoverished home province of Farah; and at a constitutional assembly in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2003, she stood up and denounced her country's powerful NATO-backed warlords. She was twenty-five years old. Two years later, she became the youngest person elected to Afghanistan's new Parliament. In 2007, she was suspended from Parliament for her persistent criticism of the warlords and drug barons and their cronies. She has survived four assassination attempts to date, is accompanied at all times by armed guards, and sleeps only in safe houses.
Joya takes us inside this massively important and insufficiently understood country, shows us the desperate day-to-day situations its remarkable people face at every turn, and recounts some of the many acts of rebellion that are helping to change it. A controversial political figure in one of the most dangerous places on earth, Malalai Joya is a hero for our times.

Katharine Campbell's father Sholto Douglas was the hero of her childhood, an unconventional senior commander in the Royal Air Force, described as 'a gloriously contentious character'. Following childhood abandonment and poverty, Sholto rose through the ranks of the fledgling RAF in the First World War before taking on a crucial role in the Second as head of Fighter Command and going on to serve as military governor in Germany in the war's devastating aftermath. But when Katharine was five years old, he began to be stolen away by strange night-time wanderings and daytime distress - including vivid flashbacks to his time signing death warrants in post-war Germany. The doctors called it dementia, but decades later, Katharine started researching her father's story and realised that she had observed the undiagnosed consequences of post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is a hot topic today. We're aware of the front-line soldier suffering from 'shell-shock' - but what about the senior officer giving the orders, who may be carrying hidden wounds accumulated over many years? We don't expect our military leaders to have PTSD, nor is it something they often recognise or acknowledge in themselves, yet this secret burden likely affects a surprising number of those making important tactical decisions. A thought-provoking insight into the damage done by military conflict, Behold the Dark Gray Man is the story of a daughter's search to understand the impact of war upon one of its most charismatic senior commanders.

From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star. She tries to remain calm and rational, keeping to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris. Yet always there is fear for the future, and eventually, in March 1944, Helene and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz. She went - as is later discovered - on the death march to Bergen-Belsen and there she died in 1945, only five days before the liberation of the camp. The last words in the journal she had left behind in Paris were "Horror! Horror! Horror!", a hideous and poignant echo of her English studies. Helene Berr's story is almost too painful to read, foreshadowing horror as it does amidst an enviable appetite for life, for beauty, for literature, for all that lasts.

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE STORY OF
AN ORDINARY MAN WHO BECAME THE
CENTURY'S MOST IMPORTANT EXPLORER

Adventurers the world over have been inspired by the achievements of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man ever to set foot on the summit of Mount Everest. In this candid, wry, and vastly entertaining autobiography, Hillary looks back on that 1953 landmark expedition, as well as his remarkable explorations in other exotic locales, from the South Pole to the Ganges. View From The Summit is the compelling life story of a New Zealand country boy who daydreamed of wild adventures; the pioneering climber who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth after scaling the world's tallest peak; and the elder statesman and unlikely diplomat whose groundbreaking program of aid to Nepal continues to this day, paying his debt of worldwide fame to the Himalayan region.

More than four decades after Hillary looked down from Everest's 29,000 feet, his impact is still felt -- in our fascination with the perils and triumphs of mountain climbing, and in today's phenomenon of extreme sports. The call to adventure is alive and real on every page of this gripping memoir.

Frederick William Dwelly died over 50 years ago, but his vision for the place of worship that both made and broke him still pervades. His influence is there in the philosophy of inclusion that typifies the Cathedral's religious and educational activities; in the liveliness and relevance of services; and even in the rust and unbleached cotton of the cassocks and surplices, and the cream, black and red of special service papers. In the estimation of many eminent figures in the Church of England Dwelly was nothing short of a liturgical genius, but one whose life history could so very easily be lost. It was this realisation that spurred former Cathedral Education Officer Peter Kennerley to embark upon research into the great man's life and legacy. Using letters, sermons, newspapers and the testimony of those still alive who knew him, the author paints a fascinating, though inevitably incomplete, portrait of a truly inspirational man who was full of contradictions. He was ground-breakingly liberal in his views about interdenominational cooperation, but he could also be dictatorial. He knew how to make everyone who was involved with the Cathedral feel valued, but though widely loved he was greatly held in awe. It was certainly impossible to say 'no' to the first Dean of Liverpool Cathedral! Such a mixture of character traits is, however, what made Dwelly such an attractive, charismatic and effective dean. His foibles were at once his weakness and his strength; yes, he was less than perfect, but in the end his human faults merely served to make people warm to him. This is the book that might never have been written. For Peter Kennerley, the sifting of the archives has been a huge challenge which at times he has doubted his ability to overcome. The material available to him has been both copious and tantalisingly vague, and he has had to distil from it the essence of a man who in many ways is impossible to portray with total clarity. What is certain is that everyone who knew the Dean, everyone who knows the Cathedral, as well as all students of religious and liturgical history, will be grateful to the author for committing to posterity the life and work of such an intriguing, controversial and pivotal figure, and for doing it so well.