In 1776, the American rebel colonists were desperately in need of arms and financial backing, and the Frenchman Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais came rapidly to their aid. Radical dramatist, business tycoon, and former spy, he was the ideal man to encourage a revolution in the making, and he promptly set up a fictitious shipping firm to supply and transport munitions to the Americans; by September 1777 he had sent five million livres' worth of supplies. American victories in three revolutionary battles owed much to this one remarkable man's efforts. With its thriller-like episodes, moments of intense drama, and equally high comedy, "Figaro's Fleet" provides an entertaining insight into the "cloak and dagger" financing of the first revolution of the modern world.

In 1185, King Henry II of England sent a messenger to Rome, requesting that his youngest son, Prince John, should be recognised as King of Ireland. With the request granted, John went to Ireland to fight for his dominion and with him went Theobald Walter, the first of the warriors of the Pale - that part of Ireland completely under English rule in the Medieval period. The Butlers would produce an unbroken succession of male heirs right down to 1515. For the first two centuries the military struggle between the native Irish and the Normans was a bloody stalemate; then in 1399 Richard II attempted to quell the Irish chieftains once and for all, but was pushed back to the Pale - and in the process lost the English throne to Henry IV. Raymond Butler follows the fascinating and not always well documented military struggle in Ireland, focussing upon the extraordinary Butler dynasty, who supported the English kings and were duly rewarded.