The fate of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1847 is an enigma that has tantalised generations of historians, archaeologists and adventurers. The expedition was lost without a trace and all 129 men died in what is arguably the worst disaster in Britain's history of polar exploration. In the aftermath of the crew's disappearance, Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John's widow, maintained a crusade to secure her husband's reputation, imperiled alongside him and his crew in the frozen wastes of the Artic. Lady Franklin was an uncommon woman for her age, a socially and politically astute figure who ravaged anyone who she viewed as a threat to her husband's legacy. Meanwhile John Rae, an explorer and employee of the Hudson Bay Company, recovered deeply disturbing information from the Expedition. His shocking conclusions embroiled him in a bitter dispute with Lady Franklin which led to the ruin of his reputation and career. Against the background of Victorian society and the rise of the explorer celebrity, we learn of Lady Franklin's formidable grit to honour her husband's legacy; of John Rae being discredited and his eventual ruin, despite later being proven right. It is a fascinating assessment of the aftermath of the Franklin Expedition and its legacy.

It is 25 years since the end of the Cold War, now a generation old. It began over 75 years ago, in 1944 long before the last shots of the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern Europe with the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no longer drawn, but they linger on, unwittingly or not, in conflict zones such as Iraq, Somalia and Ukraine. In an era of mass-produced AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was the Middle East On the afternoon of 6 October, 1973, the colossus of the Israeli Defence Forces was awakened by a wave of airstrikes, followed by an artillery bombardment along the Suez Canal that preceded a meticulously planned Egyptian invasion of the Israeli-held Sinai. Simultaneously, a massive Syrian armoured assault bore down on Israeli positions on the Golan Heights. The day was Yom Kippur, the most holy day on the Jewish religious calendar, and the commencement of a war that would bring the young state of Israel to the very brink of defeat.In the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, a stunning Arab reversal at the hands of the untested Israeli Defence Forces, Israel occupied and held Arab territory on the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. These were for the most part territorial buffer zones, retained to protect Israel against an inevitable future war, but their ongoing occupation remained an open diplomatic wound. In the meanwhile, a mood of complacency came to affect the Israeli military machine, in the belief that air and armoured dominance of the battlefield would, as had been the case in 1967, guarantee a quick victory in any future war. The Yom Kippur War proved the fallacy of this belief, revealing critical weaknesses in Israeli intelligence capability and battlefield strategy. The ferocity and effectiveness of the combined invasion pushed the much-storied Israeli armed forces almost to the point of collapse. Only the rapid resupply of arms and equipment by the United States, and a display of extraordinary reliance and determination by the fighting forces of Israel, rescued the young state from annihilation.The story of the Yom Kippur War is an object lesson in the dynamism of military thinking, the evolution of battlefield technology and the uneasy alliance of east and west during the Cold War era of d tente.Yom Kippur was both a military and political manoeuvre that adjusted the balance of power in the Middle East, and set the tone for the ideological stand-off that continues in the region to this day

It has been over three decades since the Union Jack was lowered on the colony of Rhodesia, but the bitter and divisive civil war that preceded it has continued to endure as a textbook counterinsurgency campaign fought between a mobile, motivated and highly trained Rhodesian security establishment and two constituted liberations movements motivated, resourced and inspired by the ideals of communist revolution in the third world. A complicated historical process of occupation and colonization set the tone as early as the late 1890s for what would at some point be an inevitable struggle for domination of this small, landlocked nation set in the southern tropics of Africa. The story of the Rhodesian War, or the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle, is not only an epic of superb military achievement, and revolutionary zeal and fervour, but is the tale of the incompatibility of the races in southern Africa, a clash of politics and ideals and, perhaps more importantly, the ongoing ramifications of the past upon the present, and the social and political scars that a war of such emotional underpinnings as the Rhodesian conflict has had on the modern psyche of Zimbabwe. The Rhodesian War was fought with finely tuned intelligence gathering and -analysis techniques combined with a fluid and mobile armed response. The practitioners of both have justifiably been celebrated in countless histories, memoirs and campaign analyses, but what has never been attempted has been a concise, balanced and explanatory overview of the war, the military mechanisms and the social and political foundations that defined the crisis. This book does all of that. The Rhodesian War is explained in digestible detail and in a manner that will allow enthusiasts of the elements of that struggle – the iconic exploits of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the SAS, the Selous Scouts, the Rhodesian African Rifles, the Rhodesia Regiment, among other well-known fighting units – to embrace the wider picture in order to place the various episodes in context.

The Second World War forever altered the complexion of the British Empire. From Cyprus to Malaya, from Borneo to Suez, the dominoes began to fall within a decade of peace in Europe. Africa in the late 1940s and 1950s was energized by the grant of independence to India, and the emergence of a credible indigenous intellectual and political caste that was poised to inherit control from the waning European imperial powers. The British on the whole managed to disengage from Africa with a minimum of ill feeling and violence, conceding power in the Gold Coast, Nigeria and Sierra Leone under an orderly constitutional process, and engaging only in the suppression of civil disturbances in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia as the practicalities of a political handover were negotiated. In Kenya, however, matters were different. A vociferous local settler lobby had accrued significant economic and political authority under a local legislature, coupled with the fact that much familial pressure could be brought to bear in Whitehall by British settlers of wealth and influence, most of whom were utterly irreconciled to the notion of any kind of political handover. Mau Mau was less than a liberation movement, but much more than a mere civil disturbance. Its historic importance is based primarily on the fact that the Mau Mau campaign was one of the first violent confrontations in sub-Saharan Africa to take place over the question of the self-determination of the masses. It also epitomized the quandary suffered by the white settler communities of Africa who had been promised utopia in an earlier century, only to be confronted in a post-war world by the completely unexpected reality of black political aspiration. This book journeys through the birth of British East Africa as a settled territory of the Empire, and the inevitable politics of confrontation that emerged from the unequal distribution of resources and power. It covers the emergence and growth of Mau Mau, and the strategies applied by the British to confront and nullify what was in reality a tactically inexpert, but nonetheless powerfully symbolic black expression of political violence. That Mau Mau set the tone for Kenyan independence somewhat blurred the clean line of victory and defeat. The revolt was suppressed and peace restored, but events in the colony were nevertheless swept along by the greater movement of Africa toward independences, resulting in the eventual establishment of majority rule in Kenya in 1964.

Towards the end of 1906, a meeting took place between two emerging giants of the age, Mohandas K. Gandhi and General Jan Christian Smuts. United under the same empire, but separated by distance and culture, Smuts was born in the Cape Colony, and Gandhi in Porbandar, a duchy of the Indian province of Gujarat. Both, however, went on to study law in Britain, and while developing a great admiration for the institutions of empire, each man also suffered his own particular crisis of faith. From their widely dispersed origins, Gandhi and Smuts collided over the issue of race and equality in a turbulent province of the empire, each attempting to hold the British to their stated ideals. This insightful book explores attitudes to race, and belonging, in an age when the English speaking peoples straddled the globe, and sought to impose on all of their subject races, basking under the radiance of Britannia, a common ideal of parity, equal opportunity and free movement.

The Second World War forever altered the complexion of the British Empire. From Cyprus to Malaya, from Borneo to Suez, the dominoes began to fall within a decade of peace in Europe. Africa in the late 1940s and 1950s was energized by the grant of independence to India, and the emergence of a credible indigenous intellectual and political caste that was poised to inherit control from the waning European imperial powers. The British on the whole managed to disengage from Africa with a minimum of ill feeling and violence, conceding power in the Gold Coast, Nigeria and Sierra Leone under an orderly constitutional process, and engaging only in the suppression of civil disturbances in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia as the practicalities of a political handover were negotiated. In Kenya, however, matters were different. A vociferous local settler lobby had accrued significant economic and political authority under a local legislature, coupled with the fact that much familial pressure could be brought to bear in Whitehall by British settlers of wealth and influence, most of whom were utterly irreconciled to the notion of any kind of political handover. Mau Mau was less than a liberation movement, but much more than a mere civil disturbance. Its historic importance is based primarily on the fact that the Mau Mau campaign was one of the first violent confrontations in sub-Saharan Africa to take place over the question of the self-determination of the masses. It also epitomized the quandary suffered by the white settler communities of Africa who had been promised utopia in an earlier century, only to be confronted in a post-war world by the completely unexpected reality of black political aspiration. This book journeys through the birth of British East Africa as a settled territory of the Empire, and the inevitable politics of confrontation that emerged from the unequal distribution of resources and power. It covers the emergence and growth of Mau Mau, and the strategies applied by the British to confront and nullify what was in reality a tactically inexpert, but nonetheless powerfully symbolic black expression of political violence. That Mau Mau set the tone for Kenyan independence somewhat blurred the clean line of victory and defeat. The revolt was suppressed and peace restored, but events in the colony were nevertheless swept along by the greater movement of Africa toward independences, resulting in the eventual establishment of majority rule in Kenya in 1964.

This book, the latest in the International Child Neurology Review series, is the first authoritative synthesis of the role of vitamin treatments in children with neurological disorders. It covers all the conditions seen in paediatric neurology that are treatable by vitamin supplementation and consists of up-to-date, concise reviews by an international group of experts in their specific fields. They cover: biotinidase deficiency; the role of vitamins in the developing nervous system, mitochondrial disorders and autism; homocysteinuria; conditions responsive to vitamin E or riboflavin; disorders of folic acid and vitamin B12 metabolism; folinic acid responsive seizures, and all aspects of pyridoxine-dependent and pyridoxine-responsive seizures. It is the first time that clinical and data research in this field has been drawn together in one source, making available previously unpublished material. This will be a unique data resource for anyone involved in the care of children with vitamin-responsive neurological disorders.

Winner of the 2011 BMA book awards: medicine category In the five decades since its first publication, Hunter's Diseases of Occupations has remained the pre-eminent text on diseases caused by work, universally recognized as the most authoritative source of information in the field. It is an important guide for doctors in all disciplines who may encounter occupational diseases in their practice, covering topics as diverse as work and stress, asbsetos-related disease, working at high altitude and major chemical incidents, many of which are highly topical. The Tenth Edition of Hunter's Diseases of Occupations has been fully revised and updated, presenting all practitioners considering an occupational cause for a patient's condition with comprehensive coverage of work-related diseases as they present in modern and developing industralised societies. It draws on the wide-ranging and in-depth clinical knowledge and experience, and acadmic excellence, of top experts in the field.