South Africa has produced two leaders who achieved global recognition and renown in their respective eras: Jan Christiaan Smuts (Prime Minister, 1919-24 and 1939-48) and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (President, 1994-99). The former was much celebrated for playing a significant role in reconstructing international architecture after both world wars; the latter remains globally admired for his leading part in drawing South Africa back from racial war and becoming a democracy. As a result, both have attracted multiple biographies. Today, however, whereas Mandela remains a much-admired global icon, Smuts’ reputation is much diminished, with contemporary historians citing his racism and role in constructing the foundations of apartheid South Africa.

In this controversial book, Roger Southall provides a re-evaluation of Smuts’ hugely contradictory career by proposing fascinating parallels with the life and political trajectory of Mandela. Both came to maturity as political leaders as freedom fighters – Smuts against the British and Mandela against the apartheid regime. Both played a pre-eminent in founding a new South Africa, the first made for whites at Union in 1910 and the second for all South Africans in 1994. Both aspired to be nation-builders, but while Smuts’ hoped-for South African nation was white, Mandela aspired to bring all of South Africa’s people together. Both came to stride on the international stage, albeit in very different ways and for various reasons.

Smuts’ career failed, and he was ejected from office. Mandela retired gracefully from office and continued to be lauded for his well-earned retirement, yet South Africa’s contemporary travails reveal his hopes and policies as unfulfilled. This book makes the case that we cannot fully understand Mandela without first understanding Smuts and how South Africa continues to struggle with the legacy he left behind.

Operation Biting was one of the most thrilling British commando raids of World War II, and probably the most successful. In February 1942 RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly-identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe, codenamed Würzburg. The brilliant scientist Dr RV Jones proposed an assault to capture key components. The nearest accessible enemy set stood upon a steep cliff at Bruneval in Normandy. Winston Churchill enthused, as did Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations. A company of the newly-formed Airborne Forces was committed to the operation, which took place on the night of 27/28 February. Amid heavy snow 120 men landed, some of whom were misdropped almost two miles from their objective. They nonetheless launched the assault, dismantled the German radar, and after three nail-biting hours in France and a fierce battle with Wehrmacht defenders, escaped in the nick of time by landing-craft across stormy seas to Portsmouth.

Max Hastings recounts this cliffhanging tale in a wealth of previously unchronicled detail. He portrays its remarkable personalities: the ‘boffin’ RV Jones; the peacock Mountbatten; the troubled husband of Daphne Du Maurier, Gen. ’Boy’ Browning, who commanded the Airborne Division; ‘Colonel Remy’, the French secret agent whose men reconnoitered Bruneval at mortal risk; Major John Frost, who led the paras into action; Charlie Cox, the little RAF technician who stripped the Würzburg and became an unexpected hero; Wing-Commander Charles Pickard, a legendary bomber pilot who led the drop squadron. Seldom have so many fascinating personalities been brought together to fulfil a mission that became a front-page triumph in a season of British defeats.

Recounted in Hastings’ familiar best-selling blend of top-down and bottom-up action detail, Operation Biting tells a story that has become almost forgotten yet deserves to rank among the epic tales of courage and daring that took place in the greatest conflict in history.

Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.

For too long, Africa’s history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.

In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history – from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story.

The result is a gripping new account of Africa: an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

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.

The SAS began as a lie, a story of a British parachute unit in the North African desert, to convince the Axis they were under imminent threat. The lie was so effective that soon a small band of men were brought together to make it real. These recruits were the toughest and brightest of their cohort, the most resilient, most dynamic and most self-sufficient. Their first commanders, David Stirling and Paddy Mayne, would go down in history as unorthodox visionaries. Yet this book tells much more than the usual origin story of the unit and seeks out less well-known leaders like Bill Fraser, who was essential in helping the SAS achieve fame for their devastating raids. By looking beyond the myth, this book brings back to life a group of men who showed immense bravery and endured unimaginable risks behind enemy lines.

Written with the full cooperation of the SAS and with exclusive access to SAS archives, Levine draws on individual stories and personal testimony, including interviews with veterans and family members. On every page, the book gives a visceral sense of what it was like to fight and train in the SAS in both North Africa and Europe during the Second World War, focusing on their failures as well as their successes.

This book is vivid with the characters of the men, their eclectic personalities, their strengths, weaknesses and many disagreements. Levine has uncovered a remarkable portrait of this enigmatic unit with photographs and stories long thought lost to history.

The riveting new book on the momentous year, campaign, and election that shaped American history.

It’s January 2, 1960: the day that Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy declared his candidacy; and with this opening scene, Chris Wallace offers readers a front-row seat to history. From the challenge of primary battles in a nation that had never elected a Catholic president, to the intense machinations of the national conventions—where JFK chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate over the impassioned objections of his brother Bobby—this is a nonfiction political thriller filled with intrigue, cinematic action, and fresh reporting. Like with many popular histories, readers may be familiar with the story, but few will know the behind-the-scenes details, told here with gripping effect.

Featuring some of history’s most remarkable characters, page-turning action, and vivid details, Countdown 1960 follows a group of extraordinary politicians, civil rights leaders, Hollywood stars, labor bosses, and mobsters during a pivotal year in American history. The election of 1960 ushered in the modern era of presidential politics, with televised debates, private planes, and slick advertising. In fact, television played a massive role. More than 70 million Americans watched one or all four debates. The public turned to television to watch campaign rallies. And on the night of the election, the contest between Kennedy and Nixon was so close that Americans were glued to their televisions long after dawn to see who won.

The election of 1960 holds stunning parallels to our current political climate. There were—potentially valid—claims of voter fraud and a stolen election. There was also a presidential candidate faced with the decision of whether to contest the result or honor the peaceful transfer of power.

On October 7, Israeli territory around the Erez border of Gaza Strip was invaded by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, killing over 1,000 people. In response to this, the people of Gaza have been subjected to nearly eight months of wholesale genocide. Over 36,000 civilians have been killed, an estimated million made homeless and displaced, tens of thousands injured, and an entire population traumatised. Never in living history has such an atrocity been perpetrated in plain sight of the world’s leaders and mainstream media, who have all managed to give it their complete backing. Images and video clips of hourly horrors and tragedies have spread around the world, combatted by fake news propagated not by dark conspiratorial corners on the web, but by corporate media outlets and politicians.

Baseless Israeli propaganda and deliberately-biased framing has been fed to journalists and repeated, without question, on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and in the mouths of TV pundits and politicians.

One of the few voices of Gaza to make it out into Western media has been that of writer Atef Abu Saif, whose edited diary entries have been occasionally serialised in The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and elsewhere. Here, the complete, unedited diaries show the journey of a man who arrived in Gaza just a few days before October 7 as a government minister and ended the period, like most other Palestinians, living in a tent in a refugee camp.

George Stephanopoulos, the legendary political news host and former advisor to President Clinton, recounts the history-making crises from the place where twelve presidents made their highest-pressure decisions: the White House Situation Room.

No room better defines American power and its role in the world than the White House Situation Room. And yet, none is more shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Created under President Kennedy, the Sit Room has been the epicenter of crisis management for presidents for more than six decades. Time and again, the decisions made within the Sit Room complex affect the lives of every person on this planet.

Detailing close calls made and disasters narrowly averted, THE SITUATION ROOM will take readers through dramatic turning points in a dozen presidential administrations, including:

• Incredible minute-by-minute transcripts from the Sit Room after both Presidents Kennedy and Reagan were shot
• The shocking moment when Henry Kissinger raised the military alert level to DEFCON III while President Nixon was drunk in the White House residence
• The extraordinary scene when President Carter asked for help from secret government psychics to rescue American hostages in Iran
• A vivid retelling of the harrowing hours during the 9/11 attack
• New details from Obama administration officials leading up to the raid on Osama Bin Laden
• And a first-ever account of January 6th from the staff inside the Sit Room

THE SITUATION ROOM is the definitive, past-the-security-clearance look at the room where it happened, and the people—the famous and those you've never heard of—who have made history within its walls.

The final work from foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, picking up the story in the Middle East where his internationally bestselling The Great War of Civilisation left off, starting with the aftermath of the Iraq invasion in 2005.

From the Arab uprisings and the Syrian civil war to Israel’s conflicts with Palestine and Lebanon, Fisk condemns the West’s ongoing hypocrisy and interference while revealing the horrific truth of life on the ground. Unafraid to criticise authority and unpick complex truths, hecreates a compelling narrative of passionate and engaging journalism, historical analysis and eyewitness reporting.

Night of Power delivers an essential and prophetic account of the last twenty years, which exposes the inescapable consequences of colonial oppression and violence in the Middle East.

In Morafe, Khumisho Moguerane has written a luminous exploration of two generations of the prominent Molema family. They were ‘border people’, who straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana.

Beginning in the 1880s at the frontier of the new British territories of British Bechuanaland (North West and Northern Cape provinces) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), where the political boundary between these two territories is negligible and where skin colouring did not yet necessarily connect with a particular social or political status, nor did it yet really affect economic opportunity. Morafe ends in the 1950s, where the political boundary matters profoundly, dividing two very different colonial dispensations of colonial racial ordering and classification, and two separate traditions of nationalist politics.

With this landmark publication, Moguerane reveals that the ‘nation’ is less ‘out there’ in public institutions and political struggles, but ‘in here’, in the everyday drama of personal and ordinary lives.

An accessible chronicle of how the Israel-Palestine conflict originated and developed over the past century. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read.

The ongoing struggle between Israel and Palestine is one of the most bitter conflicts in history, with profound global consequences. In this book, Middle East expert Michael Scott-Baumann succinctly describes its origins and charts its evolution from civil war to the present day. Each chapter offers a lucid explanation of the politics and ends with personal testimony from Palestinians and Israelis whose lives have been impacted by the dispute.

While presenting competing interpretations, Scott-Baumann examines the key flash points, including the early role of the British, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Trump administration’s peace plan, pitched as “the deal of the century,” in 2020. He delineates both the nature of Israeli control over the Palestinian territories and Palestinian resistance―going to the heart of the clashes in recent decades. The result is an indispensable history, including a time line, glossary, and analysis of why efforts to restore peace have continually failed and what it will take to succeed. 45 B&W maps and images

A magisterial history of South Africa, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present.

Leonard Thompson, a leading scholar in southern African history and politics, provides a fresh and penetrating exploration of the country's history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present, focusing primarily on experiences of its black inhabitants.

The Fourth Edition of this classic text brings South Africa's history up to date with a new chapter chronicling the first presidential term of Mbeki and ending with the funeral of Nelson Mandela.

India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.

The Chewa are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, representing a third of the population of approximately 19 million, and their language, Chichewa, is Malawi's national language. Yet the last book on the history of this group was published in 1944, and was based on oral history, or tradition. As with much African history, it started to be recorded only in the late 19th century. This is the first book to use not only oral history, but also documents written by early Portuguese explorers, traders and government officials, as well as archaeology, to piece together the early history of the Chewa. The author is an archaeologist, who discovered the first major Chewa settlement, Mankhamba, near the southern part of Lake Malawi. His excavations have enabled a more scientific chronology of the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and have provided physical proof of their early history as well as their material and spiritual culture and way of life. There are several historians and archaeologists working in the area of early Malawian history, but their work remains largely in the domain of academia and is inaccessible to the general public. Professor Yusuf Juwayeyi has written and documented a very readable history of the Chewa as revealed by archaeology, and demonstrates the value of combining oral tradition together with archaeology to arrive at a more accurate picture of the history of a pre-literate society. With many illustrations, this book will be appealing not only to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, but also the general reader interested in African history and in Malawi's history in particular.

An indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao's decade of madness.

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

Red Memory explores the stories of those driven to confront the era, who fear or yearn for its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

Journey through thousands of years of human history (now with the women put back in).

From the earliest human civilizations through to the present day, the stories of countless influential women – leaders, artists, warriors, scientists and more – have been ignored, forgotten, or actively suppressed. You may not have encountered the likes of Fatima al-Fihri (an Islamic World visionary who founded the world's first university), Ching Shih (the most successful pirate in history), or Huda Sha'arawi (a pioneering Egyptian feminist leader, suffragist, nationalist, and founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union), but that's about to change.

In What’s Her Name: A History of the World in 80 Lost Women, authors – and sisters – Olivia Meikle and Katie Nelson weave together the captivating stories of these fascinating figures to tell an alternative, enthralling and deeply researched historical narrative. A truly global history, What’s Her Name features biographies of incredible women spanning six continents and thousands of years, from Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire to imperial China, the Americas and post-war Europe.

Drawing on years of study and interviews with dozens of experts, this is an entertaining, thought-provoking look at the trailblazing women you may not have heard of (but should have).

The violent election of 1872 that serves as a warning for today's divided politics.

From CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash, the fast-paced story of the extraordinary election that led to hundreds of murders, warfare in the streets of New Orleans, two governors of Louisiana—and changed the course of politics in our country.

The Election of 1872 was the most contentious in American history. After both parties complained of corruption, neither candidate would concede, two governors claimed office and chaos erupted. Rival newspapers engaged in a bitter war of words, politicians plotted to overthrow the government, and their supporters fought in the streets and attempted assassinations. The entire country watched in grim fascination as the wounds of the Civil War were ripped open and the promise of President Grant’s Reconstruction faltered in the face of violent resistance and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.

In this riveting book, Dana Bash and David Fisher tell the incredible, little-known story of the election that pushed democracy to the breaking point, and sparked historic events including:

• The Colfax Massacre, in which at least 150 Black men were killed by white supremacists
• The extraordinary train race from New York to New Orleans for control of the state government
• The election of the first black Congressman from Louisiana in the face of violent resistance
• The Supreme Court ruling that ended Reconstruction and became the foundation of Southern segregation, changing the American legal system for the next century

Readers will find eerie parallels to today's divided political landscape and leaders willing to seize power no matter the cost. An eye-opening warning of what's at stake and what it takes to protect our democracy, this is a must-read tale of America's deadliest election.

Cradock is a vivid history of a South African town in the years when segregation gradually emerged, preceding the rapid and rigorous implementation of apartheid. Through the details of one emblematic community, Jeffrey Butler offers an ambitious treatment of the racial themes that dominate recent South African history. Although Butler was born and raised in Cradock, he eschews sentimentality in favour of scholarly precision. Augmenting the obvious political narratives, Cradock examines the poor infrastructural conditions, ranging from public health to public housing, that typify a grossly unequal system of racial segregation but are otherwise neglected in the region's historiography. Butler shows, with the richness that only a local study could provide, how the lives of blacks, whites and coloureds were affected by the bitter transition from segregation before 1948 to apartheid thereafter.

Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds' examines a defining aspect of South Africa's recent past: the history of apartheid-era relocation.

While scholars and activists have long recognised the suffering caused by apartheid removals to the so-called 'homelands', the experiences of those who lived through this process more often have been obscured. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research, this book explores the makings and multiple meanings of relocation into two of the most notorious apartheid 'dumping grounds' established in the Ciskei bantustan during the mid-1960s: Sada and Ilinge.

Author Laura Evans describes the local and global dynamics of the project of bantustan relocation and develops a multi-layered analysis of the complex histories-and ramifications-of displacement and resettlement in the Ciskei.

John Haywood presents a grand sweep of global history in an immediately accessible format via concise, insightful and engaging text summaries alongside timelines, maps and illustrations.

There are 50 sections, each dealing with significant moments in the human story from the origins of our first ancestors right up to the present day. A short essay introduces and summarizes the most important political and cultural landmarks with a clear timeline then presenting events in four categories: Politics & Economy, Religion & Philosophy, Science & Technology and Arts & Architecture.

Maps revealing the changes in our physical world at key junctures in human history as well as galleries of images illustrating the rich and diverse products of our cultural heritage, offer a visual path through time. From this the reader is able to access a whole new understanding of contemporary events across the globe, making unexpected and surprising links and connections across history.

Who knew, for example, that at the same time the Bayeux Tapestry was being completed in Europe, Chinese scientist Shen Kuo was correctly explaining the origin of fossils and Ghana was being conquered by the Almoravids? That as Peter the Great was modernizing Russia, La Salle was exploring the length of the Mississippi River and Christopher Wren was finishing St Paul's Cathedral in London?

This original and authoritative book offers a whole new way of appreciating the diverse array of events that have shaped world history.

Here are the voices of London - rich and poor, native and immigrant, women and men - witnessed by Craig Taylor, an acclaimed journalist, playwright and writer, who spent five years exploring the city and listening to its residents. From the woman whose voice announces the stations on the London Underground to the man who plants the trees along Oxford Street; from a Pakistani currency trader to a Guardsman at Buckingham Palace - together, these voices and many more, paint a vivid, epic and wholly fresh portrait of Twenty-First Century London.

A major new look at how Africa's geological history, climate, geography and biology resulted in the wonderful diversity of life found there. It is also the story of how it was the crucible for the evolution most extraordinary species on Earth - Homo sapiens.

Africa has properties that ensure that most of human evolution could have occurred nowhere else. A greater diversity of mammal, bird and many other forms of life has forced more and more species to squeeze into narrower and narrower niches. Human complexity has evolved directly in response to this, the most complex of continents.

On offer here is an intensely personal portrait of a continent bolstered by Jonathan Kingdon's own animal senses, the same excited set of senses he was born in Africa with. Senses that look, listen, scent and grasp at the mother-continent. Not just his personal motherland but the birthplace of all humanity.

The story of the British Empire at its maximum territorial extent.

On Saturday 29 September 1923, the Palestine Mandate became law and the British Empire now covered a scarcely credible quarter of the world's land mass, containing 460 million people. It was the largest empire the world had ever seen. But it was beset by debt and doubts.

This book is a new way of looking at the British Empire. It immerses the reader in the contemporary moment, focusing on particular people and stories from that day, gleaned from newspapers, letters, diaries, official documents, magazines, films and novels: from a remote Pacific island facing the removal of its entire soil, across Australia, Burma, India and Kenya to London and the West Indies.

In some ways, the issues of a hundred years ago are with us still: debates around cultural and ethnic identity in a globalised world; how to manage multi-ethnic political entities; racism; the divisive co-opting of religion for political purposes; the dangers of ignorance. In others, it is totally alien. What remains extraordinary is the Empire's ability to reveal the most compelling human stories. Never before has there been a book which contains such a wide spread of vivid experiences from both colonised and coloniser: from the grandest governors to the humblest migrants, policemen and nurses.

Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor spent years traversing every corner of London, getting to know the most interesting of its residents--the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub door attendant, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard. Now, in Londoners, this diverse cast of characters--rich and poor, young and old, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)--shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before. With candor and humor, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London, scripting the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.

Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.

For too long, Africa’s history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.

In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history – from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story.

The result is a gripping new account of Africa: an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: oh Pium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.

Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire's financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Amitav Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.