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Slightly off-mint.

Slightly off-mint.

The concept of ‘1968' is synonymous with the anti-authoritarian German Student Movement of 1966 to 1968 and is viewed variously as a liberalization, a myth and an irritation, sometimes judged a ‘successful failure’. This volume explores the portrayal of the ’68ers over the decades, the writing about the movement, and its afterlife as a foundational myth, whose utopian aims can still fire the imagination.

From the Suez Crisis in 1956, through the Aberfan disaster, Princess Margaret’s marriage and American astronauts in Buckingham Palace, to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977, the historian Robert Lacey gives an account of Elizabeth II’s reign, shedding light on both the royal family and the world they lived in during the years covered by the second and third series of Peter Morgan’s drama, The Crown. With photographs of royal family members as portrayed by the series’ actors.

From February to April 1947, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret toured Southern Africa aboard a white-and-gold train, meeting thousands of people at every stop. This account of the tour offers an intimate portrait of the Royal Family, a glimpse of South Africa before apartheid, and a panorama of a British Empire on which the sun was about to set.

Charlotte Bingham was 18 when her aloof, unexciting father told her that he worked for MI5. Soon, she was working there herself, alongside the vivacious Arabella. In this light-hearted memoir, she recalls how the family home was filled with actors doubling as spies, and events took a sinister turn when Arabella’s mother was besieged with mysterious phone calls.

Rather than interpret the 1958 conflict within Lebanon as part of a broader upheaval of the Middle East along pro- and anti-Western fault lines, Kanaan argues that the Lebanese crisis originated in a failure of consensus over the nation’s identity, and traces the seeds of this conflict back to the 19th century and relationships between the Maronite and Druze communities.

This first comprehensive biography is based on previously unavailable material released since the fall of the Soviet Union and records Khrushchev’s peasant upbringing and political initiation in the heady days following the 1917 revolution. It then probes the contradictions of a man who was implicated in Stalin’s crimes but subsequently denounced his mentor, and a would-be peacemaker whose nuclear standoff with Kennedy brought the world to the brink of destruction.

From June 1948 to May 1949 supplies were flown in to the isolated West Berlin, which the Soviets had cut off access to by road. This photographic document of the operation considers the different aspects of the crisis, including the building of runways, the plight of the beleaguered Berliners, the airlift pilots and their aircraft.

Nelson Mandela stood trial in 1963 alongside ten other defendants accused of plotting to violently overthrown the South African government. Revealing the entrenched bigotry and discrimination faced by the defendants, this account of the case, written by one of the defence lawyers, describes the trial in detail with close observations of all the principal characters. Slightly off-mint.

Tracing the long-running policies of Western nations and their manipulations of leaders and groups in the Arab and Islamic world, this study explores how they have contributed to the failure of the Arab Spring, the emergence of Islamic State and conflicts across the Middle East.

After the Second World War, the ‘iron curtain’ divided Germany, leaving the British, American and French sectors of the devastated capital stranded in the Soviet-controlled East. Only three air corridors remained open, and between June 1948 and September 1949, Allied air forces defied the blockade, delivering food and fuel by plane. Barry Turner gives a full account of the crisis developing between East and West, the events leading up to June 1948, and the heroic Airlift that saved a besieged city.

After briefly outlining 2,000 years of Vietnamese history, Kerr describes the French and American involvement in the country and the astonishing struggle of the North and some South Vietnamese to fulfil their long-held dream of unification.

Starting with the growing nationalist demands for independence that followed the Second World War, Guy Arnold’s magisterial history describes the momentous changes that transformed Africa from a collection of European colonies to fifty independent nations. After an introduction to the post-war continent, the book examines how the hopes of the 1960s were followed by the realities of foreign interference, internal tyrannies and corruption. This 2017 edition ends with the growing influence of China, the Arab Spring and the refugee crisis.

Was the Prime Minister of Australia a Chinese spy, and did the Soviets abduct a British frogman from Portsmouth harbour in 1956? As secret documents from the Cold War period become declassified, this exploration into a range of spying revelations and exposés investigates the veracity of the stories and the credentials of their authors and finds that many do not stand up to scrutiny.

In this account of Vladimir Putin’s rise from obscurity to power, the former New York Times Moscow bureau chief explains how the Russian leader established his popularity by restoring order after the chaos of the 1990s and advancing his country’s interests on the international stage, before cementing his authoritarian rule and suppressing dissent.

MI6 agent William Catesby is tasked with doing whatever is necessary to prevent Argentina from obtaining more lethal Exocet missiles and threatening British lives in the Falklands, set against a backdrop of political differences in Westminster.

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Edited in cooperation with Breaking the Silence, an NGO of former Israeli soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories, this collection of essays reflects on the human cost of 50 years of occupation, conflict and destruction in the West Bank and Gaza. The contributors include such celebrated international writers as Mario Vargas Llosa, Colm Tóibín, Eimear McBride, Hari Kunzru, Dave Eggers and Rachel Kushner.

Fidel Castro’s 1959 triumph in Cuba sparked Eric Hobsbawm’s interest in Latin America, ‘a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions’. The 31 essays and articles collected here represent his sustained fascination with the area and its politics. They cover topics including revolutionaries (not least Che Guevara), the Chilean road to socialism, the region’s peasant movements and its agrarian structures.

The primary role of American B-52 bombers in the earlier years covered by this study was to carry the US nuclear threat. Other jet operations of the 1950s and 1960s saw MiGs, Mirages and F-4 Phantoms in action in conflicts including the Six Day War and Vietnam.

The 1960s is known as the decade of music, fashion and youth culture; this volume has its share of Beatles but shifts the emphasis to people and events in the news, including Kim Philby, Christine Keeler, the army in Belfast and England collecting the World Cup.

As MP for Chester and a government whip, Gyles Brandreth had a ringside seat at Westminster from the fall of Margaret Thatcher to the election of Tony Blair. His frank and often funny diaries provide an insight into the workings of modern government, profiles of the key players, and the first-ever insider's account of the secret world of the Whips' Office. This updated edition continues the story to the arrival of David Cameron as Tory leader.

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John Warwicker, a former Special Branch officer, tells the story of his six years in charge of security at No 10 Downing Street, protecting Prime Ministers Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher during an era in which the Cold War and the IRA were ever-present threats.

The second volume of Ken Wharton’s history offers a month-by-month account of events in the troubled province from January 1988 to December 1990, a period of unremitting bombings, shootings, ambushes and kidnappings. The timeline is interspersed with frank interviews with both Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, members of the security forces and victims’ relatives. Unapologetically raw and emotional, the book is explicit in its portrayal of the human cost of terrorism, and its condemnation of both sides in the conflict.

An unprecedented smog hit London in December 1952, plunging the city into an eerie and poisonous darkness that killed 12,000 people. A few days later, John Christie strangled his wife and, over the following months, committed a further three killings. This true crime story draws together the notorious Rillington Place murders and the environmental disaster to chronicle a dark period in austerity London. Off-mint with a felt-tip mark on upper trimmed edge.

While the Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered as a period when Cold War tension peaked, the world came nearer to destruction in 1983 – the year of Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ speech and Star Wars programme, when the Soviets shot down the Korean flight KAL 007, and a NATO exercise unnerved Andropov into believing war had started for real. Drawing on hundreds of recently discovered documents, this book reveals how genuine the threat of nuclear catastrophe became.

‘I saw a V1 coming in south of Dover and caught up with it about three miles south of Canterbury. I was flying at 400mph and had no difficulty overtaking …’ This book features long-form interviews with over 40 veteran pilots of the beloved Gloster Meteor, the RAF’s first jet-powered aeroplane, which came into service in 1944 and played a significant role in the early stages of the Cold War, despite being alarmingly accident-prone.

China is rapidly becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and its leader, Xi Jingping, is enshrined in its constitution – an honour not seen since Chairman Mao. This succinct, accessible primer charts his rise to power and explains his world-view, his plans to eradicate poverty and extend his country’s global reach, his thoughts on China’s Communist legacy – and how far he is prepared to go to defend it.

On VE Day, 8 May 1945, Winston Churchill was the victorious leader who had steered Britain through five years of war. By VJ Day in August, he had been ejected from office and his great ally Franklin Roosevelt was dead. This history provides a month-by-month account of how Churchill, increasingly fearful of Stalin’s ambitions in Europe, became a voice in the wilderness once again, warning of the danger of Communism as he had warned against Nazism in the 1930s.

The defining year in a decade of change, 1965 witnessed a social, political, artistic and technological landslide that shaped modern Britain. Blending meticulous research with biting satire, this lively history charts how the old order was laid to rest with Winston Churchill, and the new generation – artist Bridget Riley, filmmaker Ken Loach, radical psychiatrist RD Laing – forged a new world, while the Beatles received MBEs and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins ushered in the ‘permissive society’.

London has changed beyond recognition since 1968, from a run-down post-industrial city to a global centre of music, fashion, film, architecture and finance. This invigorating collection from the archives of Time Out magazine combines news, features and interviews with key players such as Martin Amis, Norman Foster and Elvis Costello with new essays by leading writers including Robert Elms, Sarah Kent and Felix Dennis to tell the story of the capital and its inhabitants over the past four decades.

Recent events have propelled the secretive Communist state of North Korea into the news, but for six decades it has remained a mystery to outsiders. This book includes 150 rare photos, many of them never seen before in the West, that chart the devastation of the war that gave it birth, and the determined reconstruction that followed. The accompanying essay by Balazs Szalontai recounts the untold story of how ordinary Koreans endured the conflict, and the totalitarian system that emerged from it.

During the Cold War a complex infrastructure of defence installations was built across Britain in response to the threat from nuclear weapons. After 1989 many of these formerly secret sites were considered obsolete and abandoned. This volume reports the findings of a project to identify those most in need of preservation, with photographs (both archive and modern) of the buildings, Ordnance Survey images, cutaway diagrams, architectural plans and ephemera, while the detailed text explains their purpose and construction and the historical background.

The 1951 Festival of Britain brought both excitement and optimism to the drab post-war years of rationing and austerity. This book explores the intentions of its creators, recounts the effect of its satellite festivals all over Britain, and records how it transformed London's South Bank with buildings such as the Royal Festival Hall and the futuristic Skylon, spawned the Miss World contest, introduced Britons to Scandinavian design and even offered them their first experience of soft lavatory paper.

Subtitled The Impact of the Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland, this volume looks at post-conflict peace- building efforts in the political, social and economic long-term peace.

Patrick Wright uncovers the story of the British politicians, scientists and artists - among them Clement Attlee, Nye Bevan, AJ Ayer and Stanley Spencer - who were invited by Chou En-lai to 'come and see' the New China in 1954.

Dealing analytically with the movement as a whole, this is a study of the East German uprising that overthrew Honecker's regime and culminated in the transition to parliamentary democracy in 1990. No jacket.

Fidel Castro (1926-2016) was a towering figure, the leader of Cuba's revolution and one of the world's last Communist strongmen; but his fiercely defended privacy meant that biographers could barely scratch the surface of his personal life. Here Juan Sanchez, once Castro’s bodyguard, but later persecuted by the regime, shares his intimate knowledge of this 'man of the people' who amassed vast personal wealth (partly through government-sanctioned drug-running) and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle including a luxury yacht and secret island marina.