'Of all branches of human endeavour, diplomacy is the most protean.' That is how Harold Nicolson begins this book. It is an apt opening. The Paris Conference of 1919, attended by thirty-two nations, had the supremely challenging task of attempting to bring about a lasting peace after the global catastrophe of the Great War.

Harold Nicolson was a member of the British delegation. His book is in two parts. In the first he provides an account of the conference, in the second his diary covering his six month stint. There is a piquant counterpoise between the two. Of his diary he writes, 'I should wish it to be read as people read the reminiscences of a subaltern in the trenches. There is the same distrust of headquarters; the same irritation against the staff-officer who interrupts; the same belief that one's own sector is the centre of the battle-front; the same conviction that one is, with great nobility of soul, winning the war quite single-handed.' The diary ends with prophetic disillusionment, 'To bed, sick of life.'

As a first-hand account of one of the most important events shaping the modern world this book remains a classic.

Do Not Disturb is a dramatic recasting of the modern history of Africa’s Great Lakes region, an area blighted by the greatest genocide of the twentieth century. This bold retelling, vividly sourced by direct testimony from key participants, tears up the traditional script.

In the old version, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrows a genocidal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that makes Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. The new version examines afresh questions which dog the recent past: Why do so many ex-rebels scoff at official explanations of who fired the missile that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi? Why didn’t the mass killings end when the rebels took control? Why did those same rebels, victory secured, turn so ruthlessly on one another?

Michela Wrong uses the story of Patrick Karegeya, once Rwanda’s head of external intelligence and a quicksilver operator of supple charm, to paint the portrait of a modern African dictatorship created in the chilling likeness of Paul Kagame, the president who sanctioned his former friend’s murder.

The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War was published in 1938. It is G. L. Steer's masterpiece. Martha Gellhorn famously wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt:

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""'You must read a book by a man names Steer: it is called The Tree of Gernika. It is about the fight of the Basques - he's the London Times man - and no better book has come out of the war and he says well all the things I have tried to say to you the times I saw you, after Spain. It is beautifully written and true, and few books are like that, and fewer still deal with war. Pleas get it.'

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""As Paul Preston says in his "We Saw Spain Die," 'Martha Gellhorn's judgement has more than stood the test of time.'

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""In his introduction, Nick Rankin writes.' "The Tree of Gernika" tells how Euzkadi, the democratic republic that the Basques created in their green homeland by the Bay of Biscay, fought for freedom and decency in an atrocious civil war. After a year of struggle, blockaded by sea, bombed from the air, fighting against overwhelming odds in their own hill, the Basques in the end lost to Franco's forces - but they lost honourably, without resorting to murder, torture and treachery.'

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""It was Steer who alerted the world to the destruction of Gernika (Basque spelling), Guernica (Spanish spelling). It was the most important dispatch of his life, run by both "The Times "and "The New York Times."

Nick Rankin rightly describes "The Tree of Gernika" as 'a masterpiece of narrative history and eyewitness reporting by someone close to the key events . . .'

Generations of scholars have debated why the Union collapsed and descended into civil war in the spring of 1861. Turning this question on its head, Brian C. Neumann's Bloody Flag of Anarchy asks how the fragile Union held together for so long. This fascinating study grapples with this dilemma by reexamining the nullification crisis, one of the greatest political debates of the antebellum era, when the country came perilously close to armed conflict in the winter of 1832-33 after South Carolina declared two tariffs null and void. Enraged by rising taxes and the specter of emancipation, 25,000 South Carolinians volunteered to defend the state against the perceived tyranny of the federal government. Although these radical Nullifiers claimed to speak for all Carolinians, the impasse left the Palmetto State bitterly divided. Forty percent of the state's voters opposed nullification, and roughly 9,000 men volunteered to fight against their fellow South Carolinians to hold the Union together. Bloody Flag of Anarchy examines the hopes, fears, and ideals of these Union men, who viewed the nation as the last hope of liberty in a world dominated by despotism-a bold yet fragile testament to humanity's capacity for self-government. They believed that the Union should preserve both liberty and slavery, ensuring peace, property, and prosperity for all white men. Nullification, they feared, would provoke social and political chaos, shattering the Union, destroying the social order, and inciting an apocalyptic racial war. By reframing the nullification crisis, Neumann provides fresh insight into the internal divisions within South Carolina, illuminating a facet of the conflict that has long gone underappreciated. He reveals what the Union meant to Americans in the Jacksonian era and explores the ways both factions deployed conceptions of manhood to mobilize supporters. Nullifiers attacked their opponents as timid "submission men" too cowardly to defend their freedom. Many Unionists pushed back by insisting that "true men" respected the law and shielded their families from the horrors of disunion. Viewing the nullification crisis against the backdrop of global events, they feared that America might fail when the world, witnessing turmoil across Europe and the Caribbean, needed its example the most. By closely examining how the nation avoided a ruinous civil war in the early 1830s, Bloody Flag of Anarchy sheds new light on why America failed three decades later to avoid a similar fate.

From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. In "Hitler's Holy Relics, "bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.
Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christ's side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called "the soul of the Nazi Party," five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the war's end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures.
To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmler's private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi "Teutonic Knights" charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades.
Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail and reveals-- for the first time--how a failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.

Western academics, politicians, and military leaders alike have labelled Russia's actions in Crimea and its follow-on operations in Eastern Ukraine as a new form of "Hybrid Warfare." In this book, Kent DeBenedictis argues that, despite these claims, the 2014 Crimean operation is more accurately to be seen as the Russian Federation's modern application of historic Soviet political warfare practices-the overt and covert informational, political, and military tools used to influence the actions of foreign governments and foreign populations. DeBenedictis links the use of Soviet practices, such as the use of propaganda, disinformation, front organizations, and forged political processes, in the Crimea in 2014 to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (the "Prague Spring") and the earliest stages of the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Through an in-depth case study analysis of these conflicts, featuring original interviews, government documents and Russian and Ukrainian sources, this book demonstrates that the operation, which inspired discussions about Russian "Hybrid Warfare," is in fact the modern adaptation of Soviet political warfare tools and not the invention of a new type of warfare.

Illustrated with detailed artworks of German tanks and their markings with exhaustive captions and specifications, Wehrmacht Panzer Divisions 1939-45 is the definitive study of the equipment and organisation of the Wehrmacht's armoured divisions. Organised by division, the book describes in depth the various models of tank in German service during the war with each individual armoured division, with listing of the unit commanders and any famous tank aces. Each divisional section is further broken down by campaign, accompanied by orders of battle, a brief divisional history of the campaign and any specific unit markings. With information boxes accompanying the full-colour artworks, all drawn to the same scale, Wehrmacht Panzer Divisions 1939-45 is an essential reference guide for modellers and any enthusiast with an interest in the armoured divisions of the German Wehrmacht.

'The epic story of an iconic aircraft and the breathtaking courage of those who flew her' Andy McNab, bestselling author of Bravo Two Zero 'Compelling, thrilling and rooted in quite extraordinary human drama' James Holland, author of Normandy 44 From John Nichol, the Sunday Times bestselling author of Spitfire, comes a passionate and profoundly moving tribute to the Lancaster bomber, its heroic crews and the men and women who kept her airborne during the country's greatest hour of need. 'The Avro Lancaster is an aviation icon; revered, romanticised, loved. Without her, and the bravery of those who flew her, the freedom we enjoy today would not exist.' Sir Arthur Harris, the controversial chief of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, described the Lancaster as his 'shining sword' and the 'greatest single factor in winning the war'. RAF bomber squadrons carried out offensive operations from the first day of the Second World War until the very last, more than five and a half years later. They flew nearly 300,000 sorties and dropped around a million tons of explosives, as well as life-saving supplies. Over 10,000 of their aircraft never returned. Of the 7,377 Lancasters built during the conflict, more than half were lost to enemy action or training accidents. The human cost was staggering. Of the 125,000 men who served in Bomber Command, over 55,000 were killed and another 8,400 were wounded. Some 10,000 survived being shot down, only to become prisoners of war. In simple, brutal terms, Harris's aircrew had only a 40 per cent chance of surviving the war unscathed. Former RAF Tornado Navigator, Gulf War veteran and bestselling author John Nichol now tells the inspiring and moving story of this legendary aircraft that took the fight deep into the heart of Nazi Germany.

An astonishing tale of romance, resistance and bravery 'A sad and beautiful book, shining a light on quiet heroism in dark times.' Lucy Adlington, New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz Sabine's War is the previously untold story of a remarkable resistance fighter and her incredible story of survival against the odds. When Germany invaded Holland in May 1940, Sabine Zuur joined the resistance movement without a moment's hesitation aged just 22. Helping to hide those avoiding the German authorities, she was soon betrayed and subjected to repeated violent interrogations. Many of her friends were executed but Sabine was instead sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, via the Amersfoort and Ravensbruck camps. Enduring gruelling conditions and backbreaking forced manual labour, she survived through a combination of guile and good fortune. But it was only after Sabine's death that her daughter Eva discovered an archive of letters detailing her extraordinary life, revealing a rich inner world and a past she had discussed little. Amongst them were declarations of love from pilot Taro, shot down in his Spitfire over northern France aged just 26; notes from Sabine's second love Gerard, executed by the Germans; letters to her mother smuggled out in her prison laundry; and passionate, creepy missives from a German professional criminal named Gebele who would ultimately save Sabine's life. She emerges from this correspondence as a woman with an indefinable aura, somehow in control of her own destiny even when to all intents and purposes she was not. A transfixing story of survival, Sabine's War captures a remarkable life in the words of the young woman who lived it.