World War England

Best-selling author Charlie Connelly returns with a First World War memoir of his great uncle, Edward Connelly, who was an ordinary boy sent to fight in a war the likes of which the world had never seen. But this is not just his story; it is the story of all the young forgotten soldiers who fought and bravely died for their country. The Forgotten Soldier tells the story of Private Edward Connelly, aged 19, killed in the First World War a week before the Armistice and immediately forgotten, even, it seems, by his own family.

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.

From the comfortable distance of seven decades, it is quite easy to view the victory of the Allies over Hitler's Germany as inevitable. But in 1940 Great Britain's defeat loomed perilously close, and no other nation stepped up to confront the Nazi threat. In this cogently argued book, Robin Prior delves into the documents of the time - war diaries, combat reports, Home Security's daily files, and much more - to uncover how Britain endured a year of menacing crises.

England 1922. It’s been four years since Rudy’s brother Edgar went missing in war-torn France. Still deep in mourning and grappling with unanswered questions, Rudy and his mother struggle to move on. When the enigmatic Mariette arrives unexpectedly at the family’s manor claiming to be Edgar’s widow, and the mother of his child, Rudy urges her to stay, hoping she’ll shed light on the missing pieces.

Polen im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Der kleine Pawel wächst wohlbehütet in einem Haushalt gebildeter Frauen auf. Doch als der Krieg Warschau erreicht und sein Vater sich im Widerstand gegen die Nazis engagiert, ändert sich alles. Angst ist das alles bestimmende Gefühl, Überleben das Einzige, was zählt. Eines Nachts bringt der Vater einen schwer verwundeten englischen Kampfpiloten mit ins Haus, um ihn in Würde sterben zu lassen. Doch der Pilot überlebt und bringt damit die ganze Familie in höchste Gefahr - am Ende bleibt Mutter und Sohn nur die Flucht in den Wald.

Polen im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Der kleine Pawel wächst wohlbehütet in einem Haushalt gebildeter Frauen auf. Doch als der Krieg Warschau erreicht und sein Vater sich im Widerstand gegen die Nazis engagiert, ändert sich alles. Angst ist das alles bestimmende Gefühl, Überleben das Einzige, was zählt. Eines Nachts bringt der Vater einen schwer verwundeten englischen Kampfpiloten mit ins Haus, um ihn in Würde sterben zu lassen. Doch der Pilot überlebt und bringt damit die ganze Familie in höchste Gefahr - am Ende bleibt Mutter und Sohn nur die Flucht in den Wald.

During World War II the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain cemented the alliance that won the war. But the ultimate victory of that partnership has obscured many of the conflicts behind Franklin Roosevelt's grins and Winston Churchill's victory signs. Synthesizing an impressive variety of sources, from memoirs and letters to histories and biographies, Lewis Lehrman explains how the Anglo-American alliance worked - and occasionally did not work - by presenting portraits and case studies of the men who worked the back channels and back rooms.

London, 1940. As bombs rain down on London, the beautiful, talented Margot Dudley lands a job as an usherette at the Prince Albert Theatre in the West End. It’s not quite her dream of taking centre stage, but at least it gets her closer to it. When an opportunity arises to join the costume department, Margot revels in the glamourous world of silk, taffeta, sequins and pearls, all while harbouring a secret desire to wear the dazzling creations herself.

Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock - in some cases overseas, elation - was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating as usual, the reality of the just-declared war was on everybody’s mind. United States troops on Wake Island were battling a Japanese landing force and, in the Philippines, losing the fight to save Luzon. In Japan, the Pearl Harbor strike force returned to Hiroshima Bay and toasted its sweeping success.

The Beecheys were a close-knit family, eight brothers and five sisters under the loving eye of their widowed mother, Amy. As the First World War raged across Europe and beyond, the brothers were one-by-one swept up into its devastating path.

Winifred and Bernard inherited the high European cultural ideals and attitudes that came of being born into prosperous German-Jewish émigré families. To young Ian, who would visit from Holland every Christmas, they seemed the very essence of England, their spacious Berkshire estate the model of genteel English country life at its most pleasant and refined. It wasn't until years later that he discovered how much more there was to the story.

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.

Mia and Ed have been best friends ever since they began teaching at the same school. Ed bakes cake for the staff, Mia eats the cakes. Ed can’t control his students, Mia sorts them out. Mia can’t work the photocopier, Ed shows her how. Mia’s love life might be chaotic but she’s totally devoted to her super-tidy, cat-owning, geeky but not bad-looking best friend. So, when Mia discovers Ed is still a virgin at twenty-eight, she decides to take matters into her own hands and teach him the skills he needs to seduce the pretty new maths teacher, Caitlin.

Scouted for her incredible language skills and recruited to work undercover for the French Resistance in occupied France, Claire must learn to evade the enemy and help her allies in secret. Amidst the danger and hiding from the Gestapo, Claire falls in love with striking French-Canadian captain Alain Mitchell. But no one can know about their feelings for each other, and everything is at stake.

1939. Bess Dudley's life is filled with possibility. As the daughter of the groom at historic Foxden Hall, she has worked hard to secure a sought-after teaching position in London. Then, on a visit home for the holidays, Bess reconnects with handsome and aristocratic James Foxden, whom she has loved since childhood. There’s a new spark between them and Bess travels to London with James’s card and joy in her heart.

Nigel Hamilton's Mantle of Command, long-listed for the National Book Award, drew on years of archival research and interviews to portray FDR in a tight close-up as he determined Allied strategy in the crucial initial phases of World War II. Commander in Chief reveals the astonishing sequel - suppressed by Winston Churchill in his memoirs - of Roosevelt's battles with Churchill to maintain that strategy.

Churchill's Legacy describes how Churchill wielded his influence in postwar politics to enable the restoration of Europe through two key speeches in 1946. Having first helped bring victory to the Allies in 1945, Churchill went on to preserve the freedom of the world by gaining the support of the United States in the restoration of Europe. In Fulton, Missouri, Churchill alerted America to the reality of 'Uncle Joe' - a tyrant determined to dominate Europe at any cost.

Nigel Jones depicts every facet of a year that changed Britain for ever. From gun-running in Ulster, to an attack by suffragettes on a Velasquez painting in the National Gallery; from the opening of London's first nightclub, to the embarking for Belgium of the British Expeditionary Force, he traces the events of a momentous year from its benign domestic beginnings to its descent into the nightmare of European war.

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties when he died aged ninety-seven - yet their epistolary friendship was her lifeline.

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The "shot heard round the world" catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.