A gripping history of the Mediterranean campaigns from the first rumblings of conflict through the Second World War and into the uneasy peace of the late 1940s. The Mediterranean Sea lies at the very heart of recent world history. To the British during the Second World War, the Mediterranean was the world's great thoroughfare. To the Americans, it represented the answer to anti-imperialism. And to Mussolini, it encapsulated his violent vision of conquest. These three great powers attempted to overthrow the existing order in the Mediterranean, resulting in a collision of allies as well as enemies that hadn't been seen before: the Germans fought against the Italians, the Americans against the Arabs, the Jews against the British, the French against nearly everyone. The Mediterranean was indeed 'the bitter sea'. In this masterly history, Simon Ball takes us through the tumultuous events set in motion by Mussolini's lust for conquest that ended with the creation of Israel. Long drawn-out battles on land, sea and air - dominated by WWII's most illustrious leaders, Churchill, Eisenhower and Rommel amongst them - resulted in Allied victory in the battle of El Alamein, the terrifying desert campaigns of Africa and the eventual defeat of Italy and then Germany. The wars in the Mediterranean had huge consequences for all those who fought in them, but none more profound than those experienced by the lands, nations and peoples that lived around the sea itself. Based on entirely original research, 'The Bitter Sea' is expertly written, utterly compelling and unquestionably important.

From the playing fields of Eton via the horrors of the Western Front to the pinnacle of political power in 20th-century Britain - a brilliant collective biography of Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttleton and Harry Crookshank. Harold Macmillan, Oliver Lyttleton, Bobbety Cranbourne and Harry Crookshank all arrived at Eton in 1906, all served on the Western Front in the same battalion of the Grenadier Guards and all served in Cabinet under Winston Churchill during World War II. They helped Churchill regain Downing Street in 1951 and once more joined his Cabinet as senior figures. These four men who were lifelong friends (and sometimes enemies), argued and fought their way up the political ladder for over forty years. The theme of Simon Ball's brilliant book is a race, willingly entered into by these four men, for power and glory. 'Politics is not a flat race, it's a steeplechase,' as Churchill once told Macmillan. And through the collective biography, Ball presents an extraordinary portrait of political ambition and intrigue from World War II until Macmillan's resignation as Prime Minister in 1963, tracing the lives of his four protagonists through the trauma of the trenches, the Treaty of Versailles and the rebuilding of Europe after the Great War. Ball has based the book on years of original research in many archives and has had exclusive access to the Salisbury papers, closed to the public until 2022. The Guardsmen is a work of significant scholarship that presents a gripping account of British politics in the 20th-century.

As John le Carre's fictional intelligence men admit, it was the case histories - constructed narratives serving shifting agendas - that shaped the British intelligence machine, rather than their personal experience of secret operations. Secret History demonstrates that a critical scrutiny of internal "after action" assessments of intelligence prepared by British officials provides an invaluable and original perspective on the emergence of British intelligence culture over a period stretching from the First World War to the early Cold War. The historical record reflects personal value judgments about what qualified as effective techniques and organization, and even who could rightfully be called an intelligence officer. The history of intelligence thus became a powerful form of self-reinforcing cultural capital. Shining an intense light on the history of Britain's intelligence organizations, Secret History excavates how contemporary myths, misperceptions, and misunderstandings were captured and how they affected the development of British intelligence and the state.

El Alamein was one of the pivotal battles of the Second World War, fought by armies and air forces on the cutting edge of military technology. Yet Alamein has always had a patchy reputation - with many commentators willing to knock its importance. This book explains just why El Alamein is such a controversial battle. Based on an intensive reading of the contemporary sources, in particular the extensive and recently declassified British bugging of Axis prisoners of war, military historian Simon Ball turns Alamein on its head, explaining it as a cultural defeat for Britain. Alamein is a military history of the battle - showing how different it looks stripped of later cultural excrescences. But it also shows how 'Alamein culture' saturated the post-war world, when archival sources mingled with film, novels, magazines, popular histories, and the rest of Alamein's footprint. Whether you are interested in the battle itself or its cultural afterlife, if you have an opinion about Alamein, you'll question it after reading this book.