Aiden Aslin is a British-born resident of Ukraine. Living in Mykolaiv with his fiancé, he joined the Ukrainian marines in 2018 and was called to the frontline ahead of the Russian invasion in February 2022. He was one of over a thousand soldiers who surrendered after the month-long siege at the Mariupol steelworks, whereupon he was singled out for his British passport. His surrender, captivity, treatment and subsequent release received global media attention.

Aiden Aslin

Aiko Bethea is the founder of RARE Coaching &amp; Consulting, a leadership development company that helps aspiring leaders successfully navigate the workplace with more impactful approaches to leadership. She has worked with Fortune 100 companies, research &amp; academic institutes, and global non-profit organisations. Bethea is also Senior Leadership Consultant for the Brené Brown Education &amp; Research Group and was named by Forbes as a leading anti-racism educator. Bethea was a contributing writer in the New York Times bestselling anthology You Are Your Best Thing (2021). Anchored, Aligned, Accountable is her first book.

Aiko Bethea

Ailie Busby

Ailsa McFarlane was born in 1997 in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in Snowdonia in the United Kingdom. After leaving school, she studied veterinary science before dropping out to travel the United States and Europe by road. Highway Blue is her first novel.

Ailsa McFarlane

Aimee Bender is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a New York Times bestseller, and An Invisible Sign of My Own; and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures and The Color Master. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Aimee Bender

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a Martinican poet and politician who played a leading role in the struggle to liberate the French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. Renowned for co-founding the Négritude movement, Césaire was a pioneer in surrealist poetry. His achievements as a writer were recognised worldwide with awards including the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Laporte Prize, the Viareggio-Versilia Prize for Literature, and the Grand Prix National de Poésie; in 2002, he was made Commander of the Order of Merit of Cote d'Ivoire. His works include the plays A Tempest (1969) and A Season in the Congo (1966), the searing political essay Discourse on Colonialism (1956), and the long poem Return to My Native Land (1950), dubbed "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time" (Andre Breton).

Aimé Césaire

Aingeala Flannery

Aingelda Ardizzone

Ainsley Harriott is nothing short of a cookery legend; a pioneer in quick and easy home cooking, he has hosted some of the UK's most popular culinary series. His love of food and people, together with his natural curiosity and accessible recipes, make him a much-loved British TV personality. Recent popular ITV shows include Ainsley's Caribbean Kitchen, Ainsley Mediterranean Cookbook, Ainsley's Food We Love and now Ainsley's Good Mood Food.

Ainsley Harriott

Air Fryer UK

Aishling Morgan

Aisling Bea

Aisling Fitzsimons

Aislinn Hunter is the author of a novel, Stay; a collection of stories, What's Left Us; and two collections of poetry, Into the Early Hours and The Possible Past. The World Before Us is her first book of fiction in twelve years. After travelling to London and Edinburgh over the past few years to study for a PhD, Aislinn Hunter now lives and teaches in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Aislinn Hunter

Aiste Gazdar

Ajahn Sumedho

Ajay Chowdhury, the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director. His children’s book – Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical which premiered in San Francisco. 
 
 
The Waiter (Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month), was published in 2021, and is the first in his critically-acclaimed crime series about Detective Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Kolkata who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It is being adapted for television by Moonage Pictures.The Cook (Guardian Top Crime Books of the Year) was published in May 2022 to excellent reviews and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book in the series – The Detective (Sunday Times Top Crime Books of the Year) – is about government surveillance and AI. The Spy (Longlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing), the fourth book, sees Kamil infiltrate a terrorist cell. The Shadow (A Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) is the latest book in the series.

Ajay Chowdhury

Ajaz Ahmed is the CEO of AKQA, the ideas and innovation company he founded aged 21. AKQA today employs over 1,500 people in 15 offices around the world. In 2014 AKQA won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation. Ajaz co-authored Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital. For essays and thoughts visit http://www.akqa.com/ajaz.

Ajaz Ahmed

Akasha Moon is a professional Tarot reader, medium and vocational healer. Under her other pen name Kala Trobe, she has published Invoke the Goddess and Invoke the Gods with Llewellyn. She's passionate about her subject and believes that, although it can bring about some serious benefits, magic can be a lot of fun.

Akasha Moon

Akiyuki Nosaka (1930-2015) was a novelist, singer, lyricist and former member of the House of Councillors in Japan. Born in Kamakura, Kanagawa, his memories of living through the Second World War – including the loss of his adoptive father in the 1945 Kobe bombings – served as the inspiration for his most famous short stories. In 1967, he won the Naoki Prize for Grave of the Fireflies and American Hijiki, both based on the Japanese experience of the War. Nosaka also wrote erotic fiction, including The Pornographers (1963), and in later life he continued his career as a newspaper and TV journalist, as well as a politician and chanson singer.

Akiyuki Nosaka

Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche was an experienced meditation master of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He was co-founder of the Samye Ling Tibetan Centre and supervised many other centres in Europe, Africa and Asia. He formed several humanitarian organisations for the aid of refugees, the distressed and the poor and was advisor to a large number of people, including therapists in the UK and Europe. He died in 2013.

Akong Tulku Rinpoche

Akshi Singh is an associate editor at Parapraxis and deputy editor at Critical Quarterly, and is the editor of a special collection of Critical Quarterly presenting new writing on Marion Milner. She collaborates regularly with the Derek Jarman lab, and writes for the London Review of Books. Singh moved to the UK from India to study for a PhD in psychoanalysis and literature with Jacqueline Rose. She is currently training to be a psychoanalyst at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research.

Akshi Singh

Al Ewing

Al Franken

Al Gore

Al Holloway

Al Murray's alter ego, The Pub Landlord, is one of the most recognizable and successful comic creations of the past twenty years, and Murray, who has won numerous awards and accolades, continues to fill arenas and theatres around the world. 
 
He is also the author of many successful books including Watching War Films with My Dad and Command, a sharply entertaining analysis of the key allied military leaders in the Second World War. He is well known for co-hosting the hugely popular Second World War history podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk with fellow bestselling military author James Holland. 
 
Arnhem: Black Tuesday is his first history book about a single campaign.

Al Murray

Al Murray is a Perrier Award-winning comic, TV personality and, as 'The Pub Landlord', the author of the bestselling The Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense and Think Yourself British. Most recently, he has taken on the leadership of the Free United Kingdom Party (FUKP).

Actor and director Al Pacino is a unique and enduring figure in the world of American stage and film. He grew up in New York City’s South Bronx, attended the School of Performing Art, and studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio with Charles Laughton and the Actors Studio with mentor Lee Strasberg. 
 
 
He has been nominated for the Academy Award nine times, for movies including The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Godfather Part II, and The Irishman, and won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1992 for Scent of a Woman. He has been nominated for the Golden Globe Award nineteen times, and won four, and has been nominated for three Tonys and won two. 
 
 
Pacino has been awarded the Kennedy Center Honor, the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, the National Merit of Arts from President Obama, and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement in Motion Pictures.

Al Pacino

Al Pittampalli

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Alex Kershaw

A cold winter morning in the Ardennes Forest, 1944, and Hitler launches his last and most audacious attack on the unprepared Allies. Standing between the German forces and the desperately regrouping Allies were just eighteen young Americans, hidden in fox holes. 
 
In a fierce day-long battle, this small band of soldiers repulsed the German attack three times, inflicting severe casualties and defending a strategically vital hill despite being vastly outnumbered. They surrendered only when they ran out of ammunition. But then the real battle for survival began ... 
 
Alex Kershaw's brilliant account draws on the words of the decorated men who fought this heroic action, bringing vividly to life their struggle on the battlefield and later off it - as POWs.

The Longest Winter

The Epic Story of World War II's Most Decorated Platoon

Richard Vinen

Winner of the Templer Medal and the Wolfson History Prize 
 
Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller 
 
Richard Vinen's National Service is a serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of that extraordinary institution, which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself. With great sympathy and curiosity, Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with National Service. 
 
This book is fascinating to those who endured or even enjoyed their time in uniform, but also to anyone wishing to understand the unique nature of post-war Britain.

National Service

A Generation in Uniform 1945-1963

Andrew Gordon

Winner of the Longman's History Today Book of the Year Award and the inaugural Westminster Medal for Military Literature 
 
More than a century had gone by since the Battle of Trafalgar. Generation after generation of British naval captains had been dreaming ever since of a 'new' Trafalgar - a cataclysmic encounter which would decisively change a war's outcome. At last, in the summer of 1916, they thought their moment had come... 
 
Andrew Gordon's extraordinary, gripping book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of the British navy in the years leading up to Jutland and gives a superb account of the battle itself and its bitterly acrimonious aftermath.

The Rules of the Game

Jutland and British Naval Command

Lyn Macdonald

'Hers is a formidable achievement.' - Sebastian Faulks 
 
This is the account of the battle, the retreat and the stand at Amiens which saved the city, secured the line, and caused Ludendorff to call off his offensive in the spring of 1918. But mostly it is the story of the men who took part: the Commanders, the weary, resolute British Tommies, the exultant Germans, the French poilus rushed up to stiffen the defence and the still unblooded Doughboys from the U.S.

To the Last Man

Spring 1918

Andrew Borowiec

In the autumn of 1944, 16-year-old Andrew Borowiec, wearing two left shoes and bleeding from numerous shrapnel wounds, limped into a German prisoner-of-war camp. 
 
Andrew was one of the youngest boy soldiers who fought in the Warsaw Rising, witnessing the worst street fighting since Stalingrad. Wounded in the leg, he emerged from the sewers and gave himself up, taking a chance as a prisoner of war. 
 
In the prison camp he secretly kept a diary on toilet paper, and this became the basis of his extraordinary tale of survival and defiance.

Warsaw Boy

A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood

Alexander Watson

For the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus of fighting of a kind previously unimagined. Despite local successes - and an apparent triumph in Russia - Germany and Austria-Hungary were never able to break out of the the Allies' ring of steel. 
 
Alexander Watson's compelling history of the Great War shows all the major events of the war from the perspective of Berlin and Vienna - and tells how the genuine mass enthusiasm that flooded both these empires in 1914 turned into a devastating and nation-altering mood of disillusionment.

Ring of Steel

Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918

R F Foster

Vivid Faces surveys the lives and beliefs of the people who made the Irish Revolution: linked together by youth, radicalism, subversive activities, enthusiasm and love. Determined to reconstruct the world and defining themselves against their parents, they were in several senses a revolutionary generation. 
 
The Ireland that eventually emerged bore little relation to the brave new world they had conjured up in student societies, agit-prop theatre groups, vegetarian restaurants, feminist collectives, volunteer militias, Irish-language summer schools, and radical newspaper offices. Foster's book investigates that world, and the extraordinary people who occupied it.

Vivid Faces

The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923

Brendan Simms

Europe had been at war for over twenty years. After a short respite in exile, Napoleon had returned to France and threatened another generation of fighting across the devastated and exhausted continent. At the small Belgian village of Waterloo two large, hastily mobilized armies faced each other to decide the future of Europe. 
 
This book tells their extraordinary story, brilliantly recapturing the fear, chaos and chanciness of battle and using previously untapped eye-witness reports. Through determination, cunning and fighting spirit, some four hundred soldiers held off many thousands of French and changed the course of history.

The Longest Afternoon

The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

SPECIAL 75TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION reveals for the first time five unabridged personal accounts describing what it was really like in the front line in and around Dunkirk. 
 
Rescuing the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk was not just about what happened at sea and on the beaches . . . 
 
At the end of May 1940, the German panzer divisions, which had bludgeoned their way through France, halted at the canal line south of Dunkirk. Three days later they advanced again intending to encircle and capture half a million soldiers, many of them British. They would have succeeded had it not been for the heroic British soldiers who stood in their path. Their job was to shield the corridor down which the rest of the Army was retreating to Dunkirk; they were not to give way until they had fired their last bullets. They were to fight to the last man.

Dunkirk

Fight to the Last Man

Andrew Roberts

'A Napoleonic triumph of a book, irresistibly galloping with the momentum of a cavalry charge' Simon Sebag Montefiore 
'Simply dynamite' Bernard Cornwell 
 
From Andrew Roberts, author of the bestsellers The Storm of War and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, this is the definitive modern biography of Napoleon. 
 
Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just twenty years, from October 1795 when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful 'Empire style' in the arts. The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died and his Empire began to unravel. 
 
More than any other modern biographer, Andrew Roberts conveys Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality, even to his enemies. He has walked 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields, and has absorbed the gigantic new French edition of Napoleon's letters, which allows a complete re-evaluation of this exceptional man. He overturns many received opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Josephine: she took a lover immediately after their marriage, and, as Roberts shows, he had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged. 
 
Of the climactic Battle of Leipzig in 1813, as the fighting closed around them, a French sergeant-major wrote, 'No-one who has not experienced it can have any idea of the enthusiasm that burst forth among the half-starved, exhausted soldiers when the Emperor was there in person. If all were demoralised and he appeared, his presence was like an electric shock. All shouted "Vive l'Empereur!" and everyone charged blindly into the fire.' 
 
The reader of this biography will understand why this was so.

Napoleon the Great

Morten Storm

Paul Cruickshank

Tim Lister

He was the Western convert who would plunge deep inside al-Qaeda. He named his first son Osama after 9/11 and became a Jihadist. But then - after a sudden loss of faith - Morten Storm made a life-changing decision. He became a double agent and joined the CIA, MI6 and MI5. 
 
Filled with hair-raising close calls and deception, Storm's story builds to the climactic finale when he must betray his friend and mentor al-Awlaki - al-Qaeda's biggest threat to the West. Storm is trusted to find al-Awlaki a wife from Europe. She becomes the bait for a possible American drone strike.

Agent Storm

A Spy Inside al-Qaeda

My Life Inside al-Qaeda

Adam Tooze

In the depths of the Great War, with millions of dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. A new global order was being born. Adam Tooze's panoramic book tells the radical story of the struggle for global mastery from the battles of the Western Front in 1916 to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Deluge is both a brilliantly illuminating exploration of the past and an essential history for the present.

The Deluge

The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931

Mark Bostridge

The soldier's saviour, the standard-bearer of modern nursing, a pioneering social reformer - and much else besides - Florence Nightingale belongs to that select band of historical characters who are instantly recognisable. As the Lady with the Lamp, ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal, and one that is permanently lodged in the national consciousness. She has been honoured and admired, criticised and ridiculed. More often than not, she has been misrepresented and misunderstood. 
 
In this remarkable book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in over fifty years, Mark Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw significant new light on this extraordinary woman's life and character. By disentangling elements of myth from the reality, Bostridge has written a vivid and immensely readable account of one of the most iconic figures in modern British history.

Florence Nightingale

The Woman and Her Legend

Grégoire Chamayou

In 2011 alone, the US deployed one drone strike every four days in Pakistan. Drone Theory is a rigorous polemic against the increasing use of robot warfare around the world. Drawing on philosophical debate, moral lessons from Greek mythology and transcripts of conversations between drone operators, Drone Theory re-evaluates the socio-political impact of drone warfare on the world - and its people. Chamayou takes us through Nevada, Pakistan and arresting philosophical terrain to reveal how drones are changing the landscape of war theory and to highlight the profound moral implications of our own silence in the face of drone warfare.

Drone Theory

Mark Schultz

David Thomas

On 22nd January 1996 Dave Schultz, Olympic gold medallist and wrestling's golden boy, was shot in the back by John E. du Pont at the famed Foxcatcher estate in Pennsylvania. That started a two day siege at the ranch before the du Pont family heir was finally captured. 
 
Foxcatcher is Mark Schultz's vivid portrait of the complex relationship he and his brother had with du Pont, a man whose catastrophic break from reality lead to tragedy. No one knows the inside story of what went on behind the scenes at Foxcatcher Farms - and inside John du Pont's head - better than Mark Schultz, also an Olympic gold medalist and a part of the Foxcatcher team.

Foxcatcher

A True Story of Murder, Madness and the Quest for Olympic Gold

In this vivid account of the first months of the First World War, Lyn Macdonald draws on personal accounts of surviving veterans, bringing to life the disillusionment, the questioning and the heroism of the men of the British Army. 
 
The officers and men of 1914 were prepared to fight and ready to lay down their lives because it was their job. These men believed they were fighting the War to end War.

1914

The Days Of Hope

Nick Lloyd

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in November 1918, the guns of the Western Front fell silent. 
 
The Armistice, which brought the Great War to an end, marked a seminal moment in modern European and World history. Yet the story of how the war ended remains little-known. In this compelling and ground-breaking new study, Nick Lloyd examines the last days of the war and asks the question: how did it end? Beginning at the heralded turning-point on the Marne in July 1918, Hundred Days traces the epic story of the next four months, which included some of the bloodiest battles of the war.

Hundred Days

The End of the Great War

Denis Winter

Millions of British men were involved in the Great War of 1914-18. But both during and after the war, the individual voices of the soldiers were lost in the collective picture. Men drew arrows on maps and talked of battles and campaigns, but avoided what it felt like to be in the front line. Civilians did not ask and soldiers did not write. 
 
Death's Men portrays the life of ordinary soldiers who were called on to face the appalling fears and discomforts of the Front. It shows the reality of the First World War through the voices of the men who fought.

Death's Men

Soldiers Of The Great War

Richard Barber

The destruction of the French army at Crécy in 1346 and the subsequent siege and capture of Calais marked a new era in European history. The most powerful, glamorous and respected of all western monarchies had been completely humiliated by England, a country long viewed either as a chaotic backwater or a mere French satellite. 
 
The young Edward III's triumph would launch both countries, as we now know, into a grim cycle of some 90 years of further fighting ending with English defeat, but after Crécy anything seemed possible - Edward's claim to be King of France could be pressed home and, in any event, enormous rewards of land, treasure and prestige were available both to the king and to the close companions who had made the victory possible. It was to enshrine this moment that Edward created one of the most famous of all knightly orders, the Company of the Garter. 
 
Barber writes about both the great campaigns and the individuals who formed the original membership of the Company - and through their biographies makes the period tangible and fascinating. This is a book about knighthood, battle tactics and grand strategy, but it is also about fashion, literature and the privates lives of everyone from queens to freebooters. Barber's book is a remarkable achievement - but also an extremely enjoyable one.

Edward III and the Triumph of England

The Battle of Crécy and the Company of the Garter

The Fateful Year is the story of England in 1914. War with Germany, so often imagined and predicted, finally broke out when people were least prepared for it. 
 
Here, among a crowded cast of unforgettable characters, are suffragettes armed with axes, and celebrity aviators thrilling spectators by looping the loop. 
 
With the coming of war, England is beset by spy hysteria and fears of invasion. Patriotic women hand out white feathers to men who have failed to rush to their country's defence. 
 
And as 1914 fades out, England prepares itself for the prospect of a war of long duration.

The Fateful Year

England 1914

Eric Schlosser

Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a missile silo in rural Arkansas, where a single crew struggled to prevent the explosion of the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States, with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort to ensure that nuclear weapons can't be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with men who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view.

Command and Control

Roger Knight

For more than twenty years after 1793, the French army was supreme in continental Europe. How was it that despite multiple changes of government and the assassination of a Prime Minister, Britain survived and eventually won a generation-long war against a regime which at its peak in 1807 commanded many times the resources and manpower? 
 
This book looks beyond the familiar exploits (and bravery) of the army and navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It shows the degree to which, because of the magnitude and intensity of hostilities, the capacities of the whole British population were involved: industrialists, farmers, shipbuilders, gunsmiths and gunpowder manufacturers. The intelligence war was also central; but no participants were more important, Knight argues, than the bankers and international traders of the City of London, without whom the armies of Britain's allies could not have taken the field.

Britain Against Napoleon

The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815

Paul Kennedy

In January 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca to review the Allies' war aims. To achieve unconditional surrender they had to overcome some formidable hurdles, from winning air command to 'hopping' across the Pacific islands. Eighteen months later, they had done what seemed impossible. 
 
Here Paul Kennedy reveals the role of the problem-solvers and middle-men who made it happen - like Major-General Perry Hobart, who invented the 'funny tanks' which flattened the D-Day beaches; or Captain 'Johnny' Walker, who worked out how to sink U-boats with a 'creeping barrage'. This book shows the conflict in an entirely new light.

Engineers of Victory

The Problem Solvers who Turned the Tide in the Second World War

Jeremy Paxman

Life for the British during the First World War was not at all what you think... 
 
Using a wealth of first-hand source material and his characteristic flair for story-telling, Jeremy Paxman brings to life the day-to-day experience of the British over the entire course of the war, from politicians, newspapermen, campaigners and Generals, to Tommies, factory-workers, nurses, wives and children, explaining why we fought it so enthusiastically, how we endured it so doggedly and how it transformed everything, such as women's suffrage, new surgery techniques, lower-class 'officer gentlemen', a powerful press, sexually transmitted diseases and British Summer Time.

Great Britain's Great War

Richard Overy

The ultimate history of the Blitz and bombing in the Second World War, from Wolfson Prize-winning historian and author Richard Overy 
 
The use of massive fleets of bombers to kill and terrorize civilians was an aspect of the Second World War which continues to challenge the idea that Allies specifically fought a 'moral' war. For Britain, bombing became perhaps its principal contribution to the fighting as, night after night, exceptionally brave men flew over occupied Europe destroying its cities. 
 
The Bombing War radically overhauls our understanding of the War. It is the first book to examine seriously not just the most well-known parts of the campaign, but the significance of bombing on many other fronts - the German use of bombers on the Eastern Front for example (as well as much newly discovered material on the more familiar 'Blitz' on Britain), or the Allied campaigns against Italian cities. 
 
The result is the author's masterpiece - a rich, gripping, picture of the Second World War and the terrible military, technological and ethical issues that relentlessly drove all its participants into an abyss.

The Bombing War

Europe, 1939-1945

Barbara Tuchman

War pressed against every frontier. Suddenly dismayed, governments struggled and twisted to fend it off. It was no use . . . 
 
Barbara Tuchman's universally acclaimed, Pulitzer prize-winning account of how the first thirty days of battle determined the course of the First World War is to this day revered as the classic account of the conflict's opening. From the precipitous plunge into war and the brutal and bloody battles of August 1914, Tuchman shows how events were propelled by a horrific logic which swept all sides up in its unstoppable momentum.

The Guns of August

The Classic Bestselling Account of the Outbreak of the First World War

Charles Townshend

A gripping narrative of the most critical years in modern Ireland's history - from Charles Townshend, author of Easter 1916 
 
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 
 
The protracted, terrible fight for independence pitted the Irish against the British and the Irish against other Irish. It was both a physical battle of shocking violence against a regime increasingly seen as alien and unacceptable and an intellectual battle for a new sort of country. The damage done, the betrayals and grim compromises put the new nation into a state of trauma for at least a generation, but at a nearly unacceptable cost the struggle ended: a new republic was born. 
 
Charles Townshend's Easter 1916 opened up the astonishing events around the Rising for a new generation and in The Republic he deals, with the same unflinchingly wish to get to the truth behind the legend, with the most critical years in Ireland's history. There has been a great temptation to view these years through the prisms of martyrology and good-and-evil. The picture painted by Townshend is far more nuanced and sceptical - but also never loses sight of the ordinary forms of heroism performed by Irish men and women trapped in extraordinary times. 
 
'The author has devoted his life to the study of Irish history and this huge work is the pinnacle of his labours' John Banville on Easter 1916

The Republic

The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923

Laurie Lee

'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 
 
'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee

Red Sky at Sunrise

Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War

Rana Mitter

WINNER OF THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER MEDAL FOR MILITARY LITERATURE 
 
Different countries give different opening dates for the period of the Second World War, but perhaps the most compelling is 1937, when the 'Marco Polo Bridge Incident' plunged China and Japan into a conflict of extraordinary duration and ferocity - a war which would result in many millions of deaths and completely reshape East Asia in ways which we continue to confront today. 
 
With great vividness and narrative drive Rana Mitter's new book draws on a huge range of new sources to recreate this terrible conflict. He writes both about the major leaders (Chiang Kaishek, Mao Zedong and Wang Jingwei) and about the ordinary people swept up by terrible times. Mitter puts at the heart of our understanding of the Second World War that it was Japan's failure to defeat China which was the key dynamic for what happened in Asia.

China's War with Japan, 1937-1945

The Struggle for Survival

Robert Graves

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

"There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing." 
 
This is the original version of Robert Graves's intense memoir of the First World War, restoring this raw, emotionally truthful, darkly comic work to the way it was first written, by a young man still reeling from the trenches. 
 
 'We see the dark heart of the book even more clearly, and hear it beating even more loudly, in this original edition than we do in the comparatively careful and considered terms of the later one' Andrew Motion 
 
 
'One of the most candid self-portraits, warts and all, ever painted' TLS

Good-bye to All That

An Autobiography

Detective Kamil Rahman

Detective Konrad

Detective Luc Moncrief Series

Dexter Procter

Diary of a Submissive

The adventures of wise-cracking middle school student Greg Heffley who must somehow survive the scariest time of anyone's life: middle school. The hilarious and internationally bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Diddly Squat

Dino Dad

Dino Racers

Dinosaur Train

Discworld Graphic Novel Universe

The Discworld is undoubtedly Sir Terry Pratchett's most famous creation. A universe teeming with dwarves, trolls, witches, and social and cultural issues that parallel those in our own world, all wrapped up in Pratchett's inimitable comic delivery. This iconic series will make you laugh, then make you think.

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter