Europe War

Raven is a ruthless assassin, a hired killer, whose cold-blooded murder of the minister for war will have violent repercussions across Europe. As the nation prepares for battle, Raven goes on the run, hunted by the police and in search of the man who paid him in stolen banknotes, eventually unearthing the terrible truth behind his deadly assignment.

The Ottoman Sultan called for a "Great Jihad" against the Entente powers at the start of the First World War. He was building on half a century of conflict between British colonialism and the people of the Middle East and North Africa. Resistance to Western violence increasingly took the form of radical Islamic insurgency.

Published in time for Remembrance Day 2008, the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, We Will Remember Them commemorates the veterans who are no longer among us. With an introduction by Henry Allingham, 110, only survivor of the Battle of the Somme and Britain's oldest living man, Max Arthur's new book expands the circle of contributors by interviewing the families of First World War veterans.

Spitfire Ace provides a vivid portrait of the few that flew in the Battle of Britain. The battle, in 1940, was one of the most famous air battles in the history of warfare. It is a story of ruthless organisation, and brilliant control and command. And at its heart is a legendary figure, the RAF fighter pilot, and one particular plane, a piece of machinery of almost mythic historical glamour: the Supermarine Spitfire.

The battle of Crécy in 1346 is one of the most famous and widely studied military engagements in history. The repercussions of this battle were felt for hundreds of years, and the exploits of those fighting reached the status of legend. Yet cutting-edge research has shown that nearly everything that has been written about this dramatic event may be wrong. In this new study, Michael Livingston reveals how modern scholars have used archived manuscripts, satellite technologies and traditional fieldwork to help unlock what was arguably the battle’s greatest secret.

In examining one of the defining events of the twentieth century, Doris L. Bergen situates the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts. Unlike many other treatments of the Holocaust, this revised, third edition discusses not only the persecution of the Jews, but also other segments of society victimized by the Nazis: Roma, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet POWs, the disabled, and other groups deemed undesirable.

World War II reached into the homes and lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Civilians made up the vast majority of those killed by war. On Europe's home front, the war brought the German blitzkrieg, followed by long occupations and the racial genocide of the Holocaust. In An Iron Wind, historian Peter Fritzsche draws on first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe struggled to understand this maelstrom.

American Civil Wars takes listeners beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the US Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings - all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s.

Vividly evoking the confusion, horror and comradeship of war - from the killing fields of Normandy bocage, through house-to-house fighting in shattered Flemish towns, to the final Rhine crossing - Lion Rampant is a powerful, authentic and moving story, telling with extraordinary clarity how the author, his fellow officers and the men of his company lived through one of the most bitter campaigns in history.

It is the 20th century’s unrivaled epic: At a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first two volumes of his best-selling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted the history of how the American-led coalition fought its way from North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Now he tells the most dramatic story of all - the titanic battle in Western Europe. D-Day marked the commencement of the war’s final campaign, and Atkinson’s astonishingly fresh account of that enormous gamble sets the pace for the masterly narrative that follows.

Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet—and one of history’s greatest conspiracies is born.

Napoleon’s surrender and retreat from Moscow in 1812 is a pinnacle of military horror. Of the 600,000 men who crossed into Russia in June of 1812, only 25,000 would survive. Jakob Walter, a conscript soldier, was one of those survivors. His observant diary captures the everyday circumstances that soldiers suffered during the campaign.

If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and nearly deserted Paris. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. Subsequently, an eerie sense of normalcy settled over the City of Light. Many Parisians keenly adapted themselves to the situation - even allied themselves with their Nazi overlords. At the same time, amidst this darkening gloom of German ruthlessness, shortages, and curfews, a resistance arose.

The RMS Titanic sailed from Southampton en route for New York on her maiden voyage with 2,228 passengers and crew on board. On 14 April, 1912, at twenty minutes before midnight, sailing at almost full speed, she struck an iceberg and sank in just two and a half hours. Over 1500 lives were lost. This is the story of a great tragedy described by the surviving passengers, officers, and crew who were on board that night. Firsthand accounts help to explain why so few of the passengers took to the lifeboats.

This is the powerful memoir of Solomon Perel, a man who survived the Holocaust by hiding his Jewish identity and becoming a member of the Hitler Youth. This book was the basis of Agnieska Hollands' award-winning film Europa, Europa. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it is an important and controversial contribution to a better understanding of the complexity of life under the Nazis.

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War.

In this thrilling historical spy novel from New York Times best-selling author Alan Furst, two heroic resistance fighters smuggle valuable information to occupied Paris to turn the tide of the World War II and defeat Nazi Germany.

In this riveting, informative, and entertaining book, Stelzer draws on previously untapped material, diaries of guests, and a wide variety of other sources to tell of some of the key dinners at which Churchill presided before, during, and after World War II.