Adam Usden

Adam Wagner

Adam Wasson

Adam Weymouth's work has been published widely, including in Granta, The Atlantic, The Observer and the BBC. His first book, Kings of the Yukon, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor. He has been named by the National Writing Centre as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future.

Adam Weymouth

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg (1937-95) was born on the outskirts of Warsaw. His science fiction writing is largely focused around the consequences of totalitarianism. Although largely unread during his lifetime, after his suicide in 1995 his work began to receive major critical attention. He is now considered to be, along with Stanislaw Lem, one of Poland's greatest science fiction writers.

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg

Ade Edmondson

Adele Lang

Adele Nozedar is an author and photographer. Previously, she was in a cult indie band, then ran her own indie record label and became A&amp;R Director/General Manager of a major record company. 
 
Her wide-ranging passions are reflected in her books, which include The Hedgerow Handbook (2012), The Signs and Symbols Sourcebook (2011), The Secret Language of Birds (2006), and The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans (2013).

Adele Nozedar

Adele Puhn

Adeline Yen Mah

Adelle Waldman is a freelance writer and book critic. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal's website. Her articles also have appeared in The New York Times Book Review,The New Republic,Slate,The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adelle Waldman

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand is an Indian illustrator based in France. She likes experimenting with bright, happy colours. She grew up reading fairytales, watching animated films and imagining adventure stories, and her style is an embodiment of her Indian heritage and western culture. She loves animals and taking long walks on the beach, but she is never too far away from a pencil and a paper to draw her perception of the world.

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand

Aditya Chakrabortty

Adiva Geffen is a bestselling writer and playwright. Her plays have appeared on major stages in Israel, she lectures and leads numerous writing workshops and she is a board member of the Israeli Writers’ Association. 
 
 Geffen started out as a special-education teacher, before serving as the spokesperson for the Habima National Theatre for more than a decade. She founded and subsequently led the Israeli Theatre Award for ten years, and now serves as head of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world. 
 
 Born in Haifa, Israel and the mother of three sons, Geffen now lives in Tel Aviv with her partner Aharon Meidan.

Adiva Geffen

Adnan Sarwar, 35, is a former British soldier who served in the Iraq War.  He has since worked as a military consultant to film and is a writer based in London.  Read more at www.adnansarwar.com / @adnansarwar

Adnan Sarwar

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Loos (1877-1933) was a leading Austro-Hungarian architect, perhaps most famous for the revolutionary 'Loos House' opposite the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, which caused outrage when it was built in 1912, and the wonderful American Bar, also in Vienna. He wrote extensively on architecture and design, working in reaction to the elaborate mass of decoration celebrated by the Vienna Secession movement.

Adolf Loos

Adolfo García Ortega

Adomnan of Iona

Adonis

Adriaan Van Dis

Adrian Bean

Adrian Bliss is a creator, writer and performer from London, best known for his comedy sketches which, explore everything from history to natural science to religion. Adrian's work has earned him nearly 20 million followers across social media and has been featured in CNN, The Times and Vogue. Adrian was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Just For Laughs, and his one-man play Inside Everyone sold out its debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival prior to opening.

Adrian Bliss

Adrian Desmond

Adrian Edmondson

Adrian Fort

Adrian Gilbert

Adrian Henri

Adrian House

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Leslie Thomas

From Barnardo boy to original virgin soldier; from apprentice journalist in London's Fleet Street to famous novelist... 
 
At times funny, at times sad, but always honest and utterly compulsive, Leslie Thomas's story is straight out of fiction. As an orphan, he picked his way through the rubble of post-war Britain and was sent on national service to the Far East. Later he became a Fleet Street reporter, with hilarious experiences to relate, and then became the bestselling author of The Virgin Soldiers - the novel that, although scandalous in its day, is now recognised as a classic of its kind. He is also the creator of Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective, which has been adapted into a popular television series. In 2005, Leslie Thomas was awarded an OBE for services to literature. 
 
With a new introduction for this edition, this is an amazing story, and Leslie Thomas's magic touch brings it crackling to life with warmth, wit and humour.

In My Wildest Dreams

Guy Deutscher

'A persuasive and beautifully written take on how languages are constantly evolving... an enthralling read about human psychology and anthropology as well as linguistics.' ALEX BELLOS 
___________________________________ 
 
'Language is mankind's greatest invention - except of course, that it was never invented'. So begins Guy Deutscher's fascinating investigation into the evolution of language. No one believes that the Roman Senate sat down one day to design the complex system that is Latin grammar, and few believe, these days, in the literal truth of the story of the Tower of Babel. But then how did there come to be so many languages, and of such elaborate design? If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of 'man throw spear', how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced shades of meaning? 
 
Drawing on recent, groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication. Along the way, we learn why German maidens are neuter while German turnips are female, why we have feet not foots, and how great changes in pronunciation may result from simple laziness... 
_____________________ 
 
'Powerful and thrilling' SPECTATOR 
'Really ought to be read by anyone who persists in complaining that the English language is going to the dogs' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 
'I was enthralled' A.S. Byatt, for GUARDIAN 'Books of the Year' 
'Highly original... clever and convincing... this book will stretch your mind' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 
'Fascinating' BOSTON GLOBE

The Unfolding Of Language

Richard Leigh

Michael Baigent

In this enthralling historical detective story, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail trace the flight after 1309 of the Knights Templar from Europe to Scotland, where the Templar heritage was to take root, and would be perpetuated by a network of noble families. That heritage, and the Freemasonry that arose from it, became inseparable from the Stuart cause. The Temple and the Lodge charts the birth of Freemasonry through the survival of Templar traditions, through currents of European thought, through the mystery surrounding Rosslyn chapel, and through an elite cadre of aristocrats attached as personal bodyguards to the French king. Pursuing Freemasonry through the 17th and 18th Centuries, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh reveal its contribution to the fostering of tolerance, progressive values, and cohesion in English society, which helped to pre-empt a French-style revolution. Even more dramatically, the influence of Freemasonry emerges as key facto in the formation of the United States of America as an embodiment of the ideal 'Masonic Republic'.

The Temple And The Lodge

Donald James

World's End is the story of Donald Wheal¹s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War. 
 
Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal¹s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho. 
 
World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy¹s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.

World's End

Franklin Foer

What in the world has the power to liberate women in Iran while provoking antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland, to lure Nigerians to the cold of the Ukraine while heating up class warfare in the US heartlands, and both profit local gangsters and create local - and international - celebrities? 
 
Foer presents an unexpected, uniquely revealing tour of the politics and culture of football from Milan to Tehran. He examines the game's role in sustaining ancient hatreds and rivalries (Serbia's Red Star and Croatia's Dinamo); in supporting the migration of players and the rise of the football oligarchs (such as Silvio Berlusconi, President of AC Milan - and of Italy); and in defending the virtues and vices of old-fashioned nationalism. As Foer brilliantly illuminates, the Balkan War, anti-Semitism, Jewish identity, racism, social integration, media manipulation, and American patriotism have all been influenced by, as well as have had a dramatic effect on, football. 
 
On his travels, Foer encounters a collection of fans that is stranger than fiction: from a British hooligan with a Jewish mother, a Nazi father and a career as a soldier of fortune, to a fan club in Serbia that turns into a brutal anti-Muslim paramilitary unit. The result is an unforgettable parade of uniquely memorable fans - each set into his - or her - unique political and cultural context.

How Football Explains The World

Jean-Yves Le Naour

The remarkably powerful and moving true story of a soldier who lost his memory and identity during World War I, and of a people in mourning, who found in him the symbol of a lost generation. 
 
Released from a German POW camp with no memory of his name or his past life and no documents or distinguishing marks to identify him, the soldier was given the name Anthelme Mangin, and sent to an asylum for the insane. With the end of the Great War, a newspaper advertisement placed in the hope of finding his lost family found instead a bereaved multitude ready to claim him as the father, son, husband or brother who had never come home. 
 
With humane sympathy and the skill of a novelist, Jean Yves Le Naour meticulously recreates the twenty-year court battles waged over the Living Unknown Soldier. Poignant, psychologically penetrating, and profoundly revealing of the human cost of war, this remarkable book portrays not just the fate of one individual but a nation's inconsolable post-war grief and profoundly illuminates the nature of mourning.

The Living Unknown Soldier

Barbara Freese

An enthralling journey, across time and across continents, using the fascination with coal and the crucial need for it as a way of approaching some of the most fundamental questions of human existence. 
 
'A passionate plea for a more considered way of treating the earth, its resources and its inhabitants' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
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Coal has transformed societies and shaped the fate of nations. It launched empires and triggered wars. Above all, it fuelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain, propelling the rise of a small rural kingdom into the greatest commercial empire in the world. 
 
Taking us on a rich historical journey that begins on the banks of the river Tyne, Barbara Freese explores the profound role coal has played in human history and continues to play in todays world. The first half of the book is set in Britain and tells how coal transformed Britain and ushered in the industrial age. The rest of the book looks at America and China, at the birth of the unions and the closing of the mines, and at the energy industry today. With oil prices on the rise and no end in sight to our insatiable appetite for energy, the world is turning again to coal. 
____________________________________________________________ 
'Elegant and engaging . . . No subject is more important for understanding the recent past, and preparing for the future.' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'The incredible story of Britain's black goal.' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Eloquent . . . unsparing . . . The relation between carbon and climate change has seldom been so clearly and readably explained.' SCOTSMAN 
 
'As much about the growing scientific evidence of the damage coal causes to the environment as it is about the social history of the Industrial Revolution.' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'An absorbing book that never loses its grip.' NEW SCIENTIST 
 
'Fascinating . . . It lingers hauntingly in the mind.' NEW STATESMAN 
 
'As this human history of coal makes clear, there are no easy answers. . . A welcome contribution to the search for a sustainable energy economy.' NATURAL HISTORY 
 
'Coal, while it fairly acknowledges what the substance has done for people, devotes its more swashbuckling passages to describing what it has done to them' NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW

Coal

A Human History

Jim Steinmeyer

This is the story of the Golden Age of magic and of the world's most legendary magicians: the eccentric personalities who patented the first ghost and competed fiendishly in the race to make things materialize, levitate and disappear.We meet Harry Kellar, the ruthless thief of secrets who was the model for the Wizard of Oz, and PT Selbit, the first man to saw a woman in half on stage.We meet John Nevil Maskelyne, whose Egyptian Theatre was a London institution for sixty years. Hiding the Elephant is the masterwork of a man who has dedicated his life to magic, who knows the tricks inside out, and still believes.

Hiding The Elephant

How Magicians Invented the Impossible

Tony Benn

The Benn Diaries, embracing the years 1940-1990, are already established as a uniquely authoritative, fascinating and readable record of political life. The selected highlights that form this single-volume edition include the most notable events, arguments and personal reflections throughout Benn's long and remarkable career as a leading politician. 
 
The narrative starts with Benn as a schoolboy and takes the reader through his youthful wartime experiences as a trainee pilot, his nervous excitement as a new MP during Clement Atlee's premiership and the tribulations of Labour in the 1950s, when the Conservatives were in firm control. It ends with the Tories again in power, but on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's fall, while Tony Benn is on a mission to Baghdad before the impending Gulf War. 
 
Over the span of fifty years, the public and private turmoil in British and world politics is recorded as Benn himself moves from wartime service to become the baby of the House, Cabinet Minister, and finally the Commons' most senior Labour Member.

The Benn Diaries

1940-1990

Since the seventeenth century, science has been contending with philosophy, organised religion and the arts for domination over Western civilisation and society. By the middle of the twentieth century, the battle appeared to be won; scientific rationalism and scepticism were triumphant. Yet in the last few decades a strong and potent counter-current has emerged. One manifestation of this has been the so-called occult revival. 
 
In the Elixir and the Stone, Baigent and Leigh argue that this occult revival - and indeed the entire revolution in attitudes which has taken place recently - owes a profound debt to Hermeticism, a body of esoteric teaching which flourished in Alexandria two thousand years ago and which then went underground. The authors trace the history of this intriguing and all-encompassing philosophy - which has much in common with contemporary holistic thought - charting its origin in the Egyptian mysteries, and demonstrating how it continued to exercise enormous influence through the magicians and magi of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 
 
Many remarkable characters feature in the narrative, including the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon and the Elizabethan magus John Dee; prototype of Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest, but he central figure that emerges is that of Faust himself - one of the defining myths of Western civilisation. 
The Elixir and the Stone is a remarkably rich and ambitious book that adds up to a little short of an alternative history of the intellectual world. Perhaps for the first time it puts into their true context those shadowy alchemists and magicians who have haunted the imaginations of people for centuries. Moreover it offers a way of looking at the world that is in one sense 'alternative', but, in another, deeply historical.

The Elixir And The Stone

The Tradition of Magic and Alchemy

David Cohen

00.23 a.m. August 31st 1997. The Mercedes driven by Henri Paul in which Princess Diana, Dodi Al Fayed and Trevor Rees-Jones were travelling crashes into a pillar in the Alma tunnel in the centre of Paris, killing Paul, Dodi and Diana and seriously injuring Rees Jones. 
 
That much is certain. But little else. 
 
Many people suspected conspiracy from the start. The Establishment dismissed the idea as paranoid. Six years on it is obvious that the true and full story of what happened on the night Diana died has not been told. Now, psychologist and filmmaker David Cohen comes closer to telling what really happened that tragic night than anyone ever has. He is the first person to gain access to and take evidence from the French investigation report, and reveals for the first time much that has been deliberately concealed. 
 
He discloses why the Mercedes was taking the wrong route to Dodi's flat. He uncovers incriminating information about the owner of the infamous white Fiat Uno from French security sources. He reveals Henri Paul's true role on behalf of MI6. Here, for the first time, Cohen reveals startlingly new evidence surrounding the events of that fateful night, and ask s questions which the recently opened enquiry into the accident will have to address

Diana

Death of a Goddess

Dean King

The western Sahara is a baking hot and desolate place, home only to nomads and their camels, and to locusts, snails and thorny scrub. On 28 August 1815 the US brig Commerce was dashed against Mauritania's Cape Bojador and lost, although through bravery and quick thinking the ship's captain, James Riley, managed to lead all of his crew to safety. 
 
What followed was an extraordinary and desperate battle for survival in the face of human hostility, hunger, dehydration and despair, as the crew were captured, robbed and enslaved. They were reduced to drinking urine (their own and the camels'), flayed by the sun, crippled by walking miles across burning stones and sand. Over time James Riley and Sidi Hamet, slave and captor, came to recognise in each other men worthy of respect... Soon the ransom not only of Riley himself but also of a handful of his crew suddenly seemed possible. But Sidi Hamet had enemies of his own, and to reach safety the sailors had to overcome not only the desert but also the greed and anger of those who would keep them in captivity. Skeletons on the Zahara is a thrilling true story of shipwreck, adventure, and the limits of man.

Skeletons On The Zahara

Gordon F Sander

'A major contribution to our understanding of the Second World War in all its complexity.' John Keegan in his Introduction. 
 
The inspiring story of a German-Jewish family named Frank which, like Anne Frank's family and 25,000 other Dutch and other 'stateless' Jews, 'dived under' in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1942 - but miraculously survived. Told by the grandson of the head of the family, this is the gripping odyssey of the other Frank family: from childhood in an assimilated German-Jewish family at Breitenheim, through the deceptively good life of Berlin in the 1920s, to the rise of Hitler and their flight to apparently safe Holland, the nightmarish ordeal of their thousand day long 'submersion' in a small apartment in The Hague, and the joy and pain of liberation and their final journey to America, the same route Anne Frank might have taken had she not been betrayed. Based on personal testaments, records and family interviews, the book describes their life behind closed curtains in constant fear of discovery. In 1945, after many adventures and appalling vicissitudes, they finally emerged to face the uncertainties of postwar Holland and the promise of the New World.

The Frank Family That Survived

Christopher Browning

The Origins of the Final Solution is the most detailed, careful, and comprehensive analysis to date of the descent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews into mass murder: the Holocaust. Arguing that genocide was not a preconceived plan but rather a discovered possibility, Christopher Browning explains how Hitler's decision to murder the Jews en masse emerged in stages and by a process of elimination that gradually foreclosed plans for their expulsion from Europe. Only in the interval between late September and late October 1941 did the desire to "remove" the Jews intersect with the discovery of acceptable means of killing them on a large scale and with the euphoria of expected victory in Russia, all of which followed on from two years of 'race war' and 'racial imperialism' in eastern Europe that prepared 'ordinary Germans' for this fateful task.

The Origins of the Final Solution

Constance Hays

Coca-Cola is the world's best-known brand, and perhaps the most quintessentially American one: a beverage with no nutritional value, sold variously as a remedy, a tonic and a refreshment. The story of Coca-Cola is also a tale of carbonisation, soda fountain shops, dynastic bottling businesses, and ultimately, globalisation and billion-dollar promotional campaigns. New York Times reporter Constance L. Hays examines the 119-year history of Coke - a story of opportunity, hope, teamwork and love as well as salesmanship, hubris, ambition and greed. There is an entirely new chapter for this paperback edition, covering the recent Dasani debacle and events since the hardback published in February 2004.

Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company

Romeo Dallaire

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD 
 
'Indisputably the best account of the whole terrible Rwandan genocide.' R. W. Johnson, Sunday Times 
 
'Angry, accusatory and extremely moving.' Caroline Moorhead, Spectator 
 
 
When Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN mission to Rwanda, he thought he was heading off to Africa to help two warring parties achieve a peace both sides wanted. Instead, he and members of his small international force were caught up in a vortex of civil war and genocide. Dallaire left Rwanda a broken man; disillusioned, suicidal, and determined to tell his story. 
 
An award-winning international sensation, Shake Hands with the Devil is a landmark contribution to the literature of war: a remarkable tale of a soldier's courage and an unforgettable portrait of modern warfare. It is also a stinging indictment of the petty bureaucrats who refused to give Dallaire the men and the operational freedom he needed to stop the killing. 'I know there is a God,' Dallaire writes, 'because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.' 
 
 
'Read Roméo Dallaire's profoundly sad and moving book.' Madeleine Albright, Washington Post

Shake Hands With The Devil

The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

Jonathan Margolis

In 1558 an anatomist called Columbus discovered the clitoris, and so a whole new world of sexual pleasure began to be opened up - and it was a steady progress that culminated in the present Golden Age. That at least is the official history.  Here Jonathan Margolis produces evidence to show that in Europe and America progress was extremely slow whilst in other places the secrets of the orgasm created almost unimaginable worlds of pleasure. The book will draw on orgasm's biology, anthropology, psychology, technology and sociology.  The orgasm was revered in ancient societies, but by the 13th Century modesty ruled: St Francis of Assisi would throw himself into a thorn bush to disguise unwanted erections and avoid all possibility of orgasm. Victorians still regarded the female orgasm as a form of hysteria - women were treated for hysteria and, by the 19th century, were strongly advised against riding bicycles for this reason. In Edwardian Britain and America, vibrators were routinely advertised in the respectable women's magazines as a form of handy household appliance. Margolis considers the revival of open, public interest in sex in the late 1950s, and the effect of the Pill, feminism and Viagra on the state of the orgasm in the 21st century.

The Intimate History of the Orgasm

Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton brings all the magisterial authority he brought to his Whitbread-winning biography of Monty, and all the talent for tracking down and verifying hidden, controversial material that he showed in JFK: Reckless Youth, which topped the American bestseller charts for months, in this new biography of Bill Clinton. Born into a 'white trash' family in backwoods, racially segregated Arkansas, he suffered under an alcoholic, violent stepfather, on one occasion having to fight him physically in order to protect his mother. As a youth he would become inspired by the civil rights movement, particularly Martin Luther King, and as a student became a long-haired hippy musician, involved in radical politics and also discovering free love. Hamilton tells the story of how Clinton's sexual and political career developed hand in hand. This is a book about sexual politics on many levels, showing how Clinton's life was formed by changing attitudes. Here is a man who, far from being a sexual predator or exploiter of his position - like JFK - was swept to power because women adored him, whether Democratic party helpers, the women of the American electorate - or indeed Hilary Clinton, whose powerfully manipulative personality is shown to have been vital to his success,. Clinton has been polygamous throughout his adult life, and Hamilton's fascinating portrait of a marriage examines Hilary's relationship with his quite astonishing number of girlfriends. The book also covers his time at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, his political apprenticeship and his rise to power, culminating in his election as President in '92.

Bill Clinton

An American Journey

Tim Pat Coogan

Ireland's bestselling popular historian tells the story of contemporary Ireland - controversial, authoritative and highly readable. Tim Pat Coogan's biographies of Michael Collins and DeValera and his studies of the IRA, the Troubles and the Irish Diaspora have transformed our understanding of contemporary Ireland, and all have been massive bestsellers. Now he has produced a major history of Ireland in the twentieth century. Covering both South and North and dealing with cultural and social history as well as political, this enthralling work will become the definitive single-volume account of the making of modern Ireland.

Ireland In The 20th Century

Neil McKenna

‘I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work’. 
 
So said Oscar Wilde of his remarkable life – a life more complex, more erotic, more troubled and more triumphant than any of his contemporaries ever knew or suspected. 
 
Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld. 
Oscar Wilde emerges as a man driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with men, and Neil McKenna argues compellingly and convincingly that Oscar’s Wilde’s life and work can only be fully understood and appreciated in terms of his sexuality. 
 
The book draws of a vast range of sources, many of them previously unpublished, and includes startling new material like the statements made to the police by the male prostitutes and blackmailers ranged against Oscar Wilde at his trial which have been lost for over a century. 
 
Dazzlingly written, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Herbert Asbury

Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York and The Gangs of Chicago, turns his attention to chronicle the seedy underworld of San Francisco, from its gold-rush glories to its subterranean opium dens. Houses of ill repute play host to shanghaied sailors, and the Chinese tong wars rage around the city. San Francisco's historic past is here brought to life in all its scintillating and infamous glory.

The Gangs Of San Francisco

Lynne Olson

Stanley Cloud

Members of the Polish Air Force fought through the defeat of their own country in 1939 and then alongside the French until the fall of France the following year, when they made their varied ways to Britain. There the Poles were among the Royal Air Force's most successful ace pilots. During the Battle of Britain, the pilots of the all-Polish Kosciuszko Squadron - 303 Squadron to the RAF - shot down more German planes than any other squadron. According to Britain's wartime air force minister, without the Polish pilots 'our shortage of trained pilots would have made it impossible to defeat the German air force and so win the Battle'. 
 
This gripping book tells the story of the Polish pilots, who flew and fought for the British RAF in World War Two. It follows five of these pilots from defeat in Poland and France to victory in the Battle of Britain, from their idolisation by the public to the harrowing story of their betrayal, and Poland's, by Britain and the USA as the war came to its closing stages. This is an utterly fascinating story, heroic, inspiring and finally tragic, strikingly well-told.

For Your Freedom and Ours

Home to the notorious 'Blue Book', which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the United States, and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The Gangs of New Orleans, Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, chronicles the immense underbelly of 'The Big Easy'. From the murderous exploits of Mary Jane 'Bricktop' Jackson and Bridget Fury, two prostitutes who became famous after murdering a number of their associates, to the faux-revolutionary 'filibusters' who, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of public support - though without official governmental approval - undertook military missions to take over the bordering Spanish regions in Texas, the French Quarter had it all. Once again, Asbury takes the reader on an intriguing journey through a unique history of the American underworld.

The Gangs Of New Orleans

An Informal History of the French Quarter Underworld

Da Chen

In this second volume of memoir, following his acclaimed Colours of the Mountain, Chen arrives in Beijing, armed with a dogged determination to learn English and familiarise himself with 'all things Western', he must compete with every other student to win a chance to study in the US - a chance that rests in the shrewd and corrupt hands of the all-powerful professors. In this remarkable book - by turns poetic, ribald, hilarious, and heartbreaking - Chen retains his indomitable spirit, but will he be any closer to attaining his goal?

Sounds Of The River

Christopher Knight

Robert Lomas

This is the extraordinary story of Knight and Lomas's fourteen year quest to uncover the secret teachings buried beneath Roslin Chapel near Edinburgh. Their quest ends with extraordinary revelations about early human history - the origins of Christianity, of Freemasonry and of science. They show that all were charged with a belief in a secret cosmic code, linking, for example, the Exodus from Egypt,  the founding of Solomon's Temple and the Star of Bethlehem. This book reveals for the first time why there were such high expectations of a Messiah at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. The Book of Hiram will change everything you thought you knew about both the Bible and Freemasonry.

The Book Of Hiram

Tony Benn is the longest serving MP in the history of the Labour Party. He left Parliament in 2001, after more than half a century in the House of Commons, to devote more time to politics. This volume of his Diaries describes and comments, in a refreshing and honest way, upon the events of a momentous decade including two world wars, a change of government in Britain and the emergence of New Labour, of which he makes clear he is not a member. Tony Benn's account is a well documented, formidable and principled critique of the New Labour Project, full of drama, opinion, humour, anecdotes and sparkling pen-portraits of politicians on both sides of the political divide. But his narrative is also broader and more revealing about day-to-day political life, covering many aspects normally disregarded by historians and lobby correspondents, relating to his work in the constituency, including his advice surgeries. This volume also offers far more of an insight into Tony Benn's personal life, his thoughts about the future and his relationship with his family, especially his remarkable wife Caroline, whose illness and death overshadow these years. Tony Benn is a unique figure on the British political landscape: a true democrat, a passionate socialist and diarist without equal. With this volume, his published Diaries cover British politics for over sixty years. It is edited, as are all others, by Ruth Winstone.

Free At Last

Diaries 1991 - 2001

David Rohl

As the leading figure in New Archaeology, David Rohl has been at the forefront of the movement to discover the archaeological evidence for events described in the Old Testament which we have come to think of as myths. His previous books, Test of Time and Legend presented the arguments and counter-arguments. In From Eden to Exile this discursive approach is replaced by historical storytelling, which follows the sequence of events from the rise of Neolithic civilisation in a region now part of Iran which inspired the story of the Garden of Eden, through Noah, Abraham and the sojourn in Egypt, to the fall of Jericho, the dual kingdoms of the Promised Land and lastly, the exile in Babylon, where the stories of the Old Testament were collated into something very like their present form. A fascinating history book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in ancient history, religion and archaeology.

From Eden To Exile

A.N. Wilson

People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilson's superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day. The 'global village' is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit, and how did they remake the world in their view? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A. N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.

The Victorians

Clara Olink Kelly

"Why didn't you try to escape?" That was all she said. I had imagined my grandmother telling us how lovely it was to see us at last. I saw again in my mind's eye the barbed wire fences and the soldiers with the glistening bayonets, and felt once more that excruciating fear in the pit of my stomach. Try to escape? Lots of people had tried to escape. 
 
When the Japanese invaded the beautiful Indonesian island of Java during the Second World War Clara Kelly was four years old. Her family was separated, her father sent to work on the Burma railway, and she together with her mother and her two brothers, one a six-week-old baby, was sent to a 'women's camp'. They were interned there until the end of the war. Clara's descriptions of the appalling deprivations and impersonal brutality of the camp, easily recognisable as the same techniques used in the infamously cruel Japanes prisoner of war camps - standing in the baking heat for hours of 'Tenko' role-call, living on one cup of rice a day - are countered by the courage and resilience shown by all the internees, most poignantly her own mother.

The Flamboya Tree

Memories of a Family's War Time Courage

John Wilsey

'A remarkable book - a worthy tribute both to the man John Wilsey calls "an unusual hero" and to the ethos of the British Army in which he lived and died.' John Keegan in his ForewordThis is the biography of the Falklands War hero whose death in the battle for Darwin and Goose Green was one of the turning points in the whole campaign. It is written with the consent of H Jones's widow, Sara, and is published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of his death at the climax of the Falklands War.  It is the story of an emblematic but complex war hero whose family history was unusual, whose army life included exposure to most of the military problems which Britain has encountered since the Second World War  (including security in Northern Ireland, where H Jones was responsible for the search for Robert Nairac), and whose dramatic death and subsequent posthumous VC symbolised an extraordinary campaign which was truly the end of an era.

H Jones VC

The Life & Death of an Unusual Hero

Described by his creator as 'short, fat and primitive', Evert Bäckström is a rather unique homicide detective but he is undeniably the real deal with it comes to modern policing. 
 
This series is blackly comic, thrillingly compelling and utterly real.

Bäckström

CAMP GOLD

Caedmon Aisquith

Cairo Trilogy

Can You Solve the Murder?

Capital

Care Bears

Cartoon Kid

Cath Kidston

A crime-fiction series with a twist - private investigator Catherine Berlin, is a damaged soul struggling with a heroin addiction, but she still manages to do her best, even when her own neck is on the chopping block.

Catherine Berlin

Celeste Express

Central Intelligence

Chaos and Flame

Charles Hayden

Charles Paris Dramatisations

Charlie Bass

Charlie Changes Into a Chicken

Charlie and Lola

Cherry Blossoms After Winter

Chevalier

Chinese Cinderella

Life at Tanglewood isn't all sleepovers, picnics and beach parties. Cherry, Summer, Skye, Coco and Honey all face some tough life challenges in this delicious series from bestselling girls' favourite Cathy Cassidy. Every sister has a secret to share. Which one will be your favourite?

Chocolate Box Girls

Christmas

Chronicles of Vladimir Tod

Churchminister

Welcome inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, and learn how one man - clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable - fought to reach the top.

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