Hitler's U-boats and his dreaded pocket battleships such as Bismarck and Tirpitz - Churchill dubbed the latter as 'The Beast' - continue to fascinate an ever-growing interest in the Second World War. Despite a numerical disadvantage when compared the Royal Navy, Hitler's U-boats wrecked havoc in the Atlantic against vulnerable convoys and the doomed Bismarck took on the might of Britain's battleships in a mighty clash of the titans. Hitler's Naval Bases, a work of love that took the author over forty years to research and write, is the most comprehensive and dedicated book on the subject matter. A world's first, it covers bases in remarkable detail from the smallest and unmanned locations to the largest dedicated bases in Lorient, Kiel and Wilhemshaven. The book covers the different types of naval base from isolated and forgotten bases, escape and survival bases, to the extremities of the main naval bases. The functions and various departments - artillery, ship construction to dockyard medical service - are explained as are North Sea naval bases in Emden, The Weser Ports and Cuxhaven, Baltic ports, the major bases that never were ('The Lobster's Claw on Heligoland') to France, Asia and German colonies, including re-fuelling in Spain and bases located in Russia and in the 'Heart of England'. Also covered are naval artillery and naval infantry as well as the anatomy of coastal artillery batteries, the shipping yards and even rules for living in such conditions. A most lavish and phenomenal book, it is beautifully illustrated with over 200 unpublished photographs complemented with thousands of unique interviews with veterans during the war as well as survivors. A labour of love, Hitler's Naval Bases is written by a world's leading authoritarian figure and is an essential book for those interested in the armed forces of the Third Reich.

Ocean-going U-boats, each one not much longer than four European articulated lorries with up to sixty men inside them, sailed the far-off seas to reap havoc in hot inhospitable waters. The air forces and navies from Britain, the United States and other colonial countries followed to make this a daring and death-threatening venture. The facts of what the U-boats achieved against massive odds have been told before, but 'U-Boats of the Second World War: Their Longest Voyages' is different. It concentrates more on how it was done. How the men survived, how they lived and died and how they still found time to carry out their orders. The book is based on masses of previously unpublished documents from the German U-boat Museum, many of them written during or shortly after the war by men who survived this bitter conflict. This is the story of how specially built long-range ocean-going U-boats started out one step ahead of the Allied navies and air power, how they fell one step behind and how they finally vanished into the depths of the biggest and deepest oceans.This is a remarkable story of endurance, courage and comradeship that terrified the world for the most critical period of the Second World War. The author, Jak P. Mallmann Showell, is the son of a U-boat diesel mechanic who disappeared in those warm waters two months before the author was born.

It is remarkable that a technically-minded Roman Catholic RAF fighter pilot, who studied physics at Scotland's oldest university and became a physical education teacher after the war, should find himself in close contact with a traditional witchcraft coven as early as 1942. This was outrageous and dangerous. The Witchcraft Act was not repealed until almost ten years later and the Old Religion, the pre-Christian religion of North-West Europe, was still banned. Yet, Bill Love (that's his real name) remained firmly attached to the concept of living in harmony with nature, and in 1953, he asked to join such a coven. The High Priestess, who initiated him, had herself been drawn into The Craft during the 1920s and often told stories of older members with memories going back to the end of the 19th century. So, Love's story has ancient roots with passed-on memories from a time when everything connected to this way of life was very much against the law. Love learned to live in harmony with nature from the experience of doing what these elders taught him and, in addition to this, during the 1950s, he met many of the famous people who first brought this innate way of life to the public's attention. This provided him with unique opportunities of following roots into spheres, which many modern practitioners of Wicca can only dream about.