England Wars

As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the bomb's strategic implications.

Drawing upon evidence from archives across the world, Veiled Warriors offers a compelling account of nurses' wartime experiences and a clear appraisal of their work and its contribution to the allied cause between 1914 and 1918, on both the Western and the Eastern Fronts. Nurses believed they were involved in a multi-layered battle. Primarily, they were fighting for the lives of their patients on the "second battlefield" of casualty clearing stations, transports, and military hospitals.

George Rogers Clark (1752-1818) led four victorious campaigns against the Indians and British in the Ohio Valley during the American Revolution, but his most astonishing coup was recapturing Fort Sackville in 1779 when he was only 26. For 18 days, in the dead of winter, Clark and his troops marched through bone-chilling nights to reach the fort. With a deft mix of guile and violence, Clark led his men to triumph without losing a single soldier.

From the author of the best-selling Forgotten Voices of the Great War comes a final look at the last 21 living British veterans of the First World War. These interviews, conducted in 2004, will never be repeated, as the youngest was 106 years old, and most are now gone. These first-person accounts follow the young soldiers from their homes throughout Britain to the raging battles while in the service of the Royal Field Artillery, Black Watch, Royal Navy, and others.

Two men are on the run. They have 400 miles to go across hostile territory. Soldiers on the ground track them day and night, a helicopter circles above, life becomes a second-by-second fight for survival. Each muscle movement, drop of sweat, glance and instinct matters. Every second counts. Through long slogs across country, risky raids for supplies, moments of sheer panic and under the intense pressure to survive, an unbreakable bond between two men is forged.

Six raids that changed the course of history. Operation Judgement: one of the most spectacular efforts of World War Two, where obsolete British biplanes attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto. Operation Archery: the first true combined operation carried out by all three British forces. This successful raid persuaded Hitler that the Allies were planning a full-scale invasion. Operation Biting: a cross-Channel raid into France that was the first major attack by the British Airborne Division and its first battle honour. Operation Gunnerside: a dramatic demolition assault on Hitler's atomic bomb plant in Norway....

The Wars of Scottish Independence were a series of conflicts between Scotland and England that spanned more than 60 years during the 13th and 14th centuries. These wars led directly to the establishment of Scotland as an independent, sovereign country and to the emergence of two of Scotland’s best-known national heroes, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Yet these wars are much more than a simple struggle on the part of Scotland to free itself from English incursions.

Bletchley 1945: a place where nearly 10,000 people would contribute decisively to the Allied war effort. Their role? To decode the Enigma cypher used by the Germans for high-level communications. It is an astonishing story. A melting pot of Oxbridge dons, maverick oddballs and more regular citizens worked night and day at Station X, as Bletchley Park was known, to derive intelligence information from German coded messages.

Knowing everything we do about siege warfare and the medieval way of conquering and being conquered, this book sheds more light on the series of wars that formed the initiative to become independent as a Scottish nation. There is much confusion about the Scottish wars of independence, and in this book, we will clarify some of that. In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the Wars of Scottish Independence were a series of army fights performed between the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England. These are significant events in Scottish history.

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.

With characteristic verve and integrity, Ann Widdecombe recalls her life and highlights the people and events that most influenced her along the way. From her early family life in Singapore and her convent school days to her student ambitions at Birmingham and Oxford, and her long-serving years as an MP, this is the life story of one of our most outspoken and celebrated politicians. Offering unique insight into her time as a Minister in three Departments and the Shadow Cabinet in the 1990s, Ann also explains the roots of her conversion to Catholicism in 1993 and her deeply held views on abortion and gay marriage.

The Pequot War (1636-1638) was a short-lived but extremely violent and bloody episode in United States history. This event represents one of the turning points in the entire history of North America, as the war changed the balance of power. The Dutch colonial authorities lost their status of being the dominant economic and political force, while the English took over this epithet. The end of the war also represented the first stage in England’s intensive expansion in that part of the world.

Sir Maurice Oldfield was one of the most important British spies of the Cold War era. A farmer's son from a provincial grammar school, Sir Maurice was the first Chief of MI6 who didn't come to the role via the traditional route. Oldfield was the voice of British Intelligence in Washington at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and was largely responsible for keeping the UK out of the Vietnam War. Working his way to the top, he took on the job of rebuilding confidence in the British Secret Service in the wake of the Cambridge spies scandal.

China loomed large on the world stage. Wealth, power, and hundreds of years of rule by the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty catapulted them to new heights, but with power and prestige came those who would do anything to usurp their authority and undermine their sense of stability. The British Empire and its faithful allies devised a masterful plan and executed it with stark precision. Vicious lies, cheating, and stealing were only the beginning of what they had in store for the nation.

Alan Whicker joined the Army Film and Photo Unit as an 18-year-old army officer, following the Allied advance through Italy, from Sicily to Venice. He filmed the troops on the front line, met Montgomery, and other military luminaries, filmed the battered body of Mussolini after his execution and accepted the surrender of the SS in Milan. This is remarkable account of the Italian campaign of 1943 and 1944 as he retraces of his steps over sixty years later.

The Sukhoi Su-57 “Felon”. The Russian Federation’s formidable new stealth fighter. Sleek, dangerous, and—forward-deployed into the maelstrom of the Syrian Civil War for field testing—vulnerable. For the CIA, the Su-57’s presence in Syria presents an opportunity. For Mossad’s David Shafron, the former assassin once known as the “Lion of God”, it represents a threat. For the Syrian rebels soon tasked with its recovery...their own damnation. It’s a high-stakes gambit worthy of the Cold War, but this war is red-hot.

The unlikely man at the roiling center of this intrigue was Robert Bunch, an American-born Englishman who had maneuvered his way to the position of British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew to loathe slavery and the righteousness of its practitioners. Bunch used his unique perch and boundless ambition to become a key player, sending reams of dispatches to the home government and eventually becoming the Crown's best secret source on the Confederacy.

During the Second World War, people arrived in Britain from all over the world as troops, war-workers, nurses, refugees, exiles, and prisoners-of-war, chiefly from Europe, America, and the British Empire. Between 1939 and 1945, the population in Britain became more diverse than it had ever been before. Through diaries, letters, and interviews, Mixing It tells of ordinary lives pushed to extraordinary lengths.

Built in 1927, the German ocean liner Cap Arcona was the greatest ship since the Titanic. When the Nazis seized control, she was stripped down for use as a floating barracks and troop transport. Hitler's minister, Joseph Goebbels, later cast her as a "star" in the epic propaganda film about the sinking of the legendary Titanic. In the Third Reich's final desperate days, when SS Cap Arcona was mistakenly bombed by the British Air Force, concentration camp prisoners packed the ship.

Explore the captivating events and people of the Wars of Scottish Independence. The borderland between Scotland and England has historically been a site of struggle, violence, and conflict. This was acutely so during the First Scottish War of Independence. The tumult during this medieval period was grand, presenting a historical stage filled with memorable larger-than-life figures such as Edward I, William Wallace, also known as "Braveheart”, and Robert de Bruce. In this audiobook, you'll discover the revolutionary events that formed both Scottish and English history.