By thoroughly re-examining all available evidence, this investigation into the arson attack on the German parliament building in 1933, four weeks after Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor, seeks to resolve the controversy over who started the Reichstag fire. It debunks claims that it was the Nazis themselves, and concludes that Marinus van der Lubbe, a communist sympathiser, was the lone perpetrator of a crime that arguably led to the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

In this 2016 edition of his 1996 study, the former British Ambassador to Washington explores the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States since 1940. Drawing on his own experience as well as official documents, diaries and memoirs, Robin Renwick examines the perspectives of each side during moments of crisis, including the Second World War, Suez, the Falklands, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. With Britain’s role in the world about to be transformed by Brexit, the book assesses the prospects for Anglo-American co-operation.

Although German gas attacks on the battlefields of the First World War were greeted with horror, the Allies responded by developing their own chemical weapons. In America, laboratories began engaging in chemical weapon research, eventually amalgamating into the Chemical Warfare Service. This history of the organization brings together the key scientists, politicians and military personnel involved in its establishment, and describes the numerous logistical and ethical challenges they faced in deploying gas against the Germans. Off-mint with felt-tip mark on upper trimmed edge.

Created by slave revolution in 1803, Haiti has endured dictatorship, corruption, violence and, recently, a devastating earthquake. Drawing on personal knowledge of the country’s elite, this is a definitive history of a troubled nation. Slightly off-mint.

Following the failure of the Munich Beer Hall putsch in early November 1923, Adolf Hitler spent the rest of that year and most of 1924 in Landsberg Prison. During that time, he transformed himself from disgraced rabble-rouser to self-assured politician, on a trajectory to the chancellery. Beginning with the Bavarian political scene in 1923 and the putsch itself, this book focuses on Hitler’s trial for treason and his year in prison, writing Mein Kampf and hardening his Nazi ideology.

Deemed unfit for army service when he tried to enlist in 1914, Barclay Baron (1884–1964) served instead with the Young Men’s Christian Association, or ‘Red Triangle’, in France, Belgium and occupied Germany, from 1915 to 1919. His memoirs and letters give a vivid account of the often overlooked war work of the YMCA in supporting British troops on the Western Front. The memoirs are accompanied by substantial chapters on Baron himself and the wartime YMCA.

The treaty of Rapallo was concluded by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1922, and was to have significant consequences for Britain, France and newly created small states in east central Europe. This study focuses on the impact of the treaty and ‘the myth of Rapallo’ – the fear of a secret Russo-German alliance – on British foreign policy between 1922 and 1934, the year which signalled the end of the Rapallo relationship as Germany signed a non-aggression pact with Poland.