20th Century History

The Spanish Civil War is largely known through the accounts of outsiders such as Orwell and Hemingway, with the long years of Franco's dictatorship seen as an era of silence and suppression. This compelling investigation dispels that myth, demonstrating how the memory of these events was kept alive in novels, films, paintings and sculpture. Interviewing the descendants of those killed by the regime, Jeremy Treglown examines how, in recent years, the country has begun to come to terms with its past.

Had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 escalated to nuclear strikes, American missiles would have been launched from sites in England and those locations were therefore targets themselves. Drawing on interviews with the RAF personnel responsible for holding the Thor ballistic missiles in a state of constant readiness, this analysis explores the most dangerous period of the Cold War from the perspective of Britain as the front line.

At the end of the Second World War, many of the Bletchley Park codebreakers were moved on to the newly formed GCHQ to keep tabs on Britain's new foe, the Soviet Union. This book explores their work in the early period of the Cold War as Western and Eastern blocs were established and cryptanalysts attempted to uncover the secrets behind flashpoints such as the Berlin Blockade, the Cambridge spy ring and the revolution in China.

Venice, 1358: while Oswald de Lacy awaits a pilgrim ship bound for the Holy Land, he falls under the dangerous spell of the island state; and a dead man on carnival night takes him deeper into its dark intrigues.

When a Cambridge professor found wiring beneath the floor of his house, he had little idea of the building’s astonishing past. In April 1945 Farm Hall was used to house ten of Germany’s top nuclear scientists captured during the collapse of the Reich. This gripping narrative probes a murky world of espionage to tell how their conversations, bugged by MI6, revealed the extent of the Nazis’ nuclear ambitions, and investigates whether they were kidnapped to thwart not Hitler, but Stalin.

Since its foundation in 1948 Israel has been torn between its ambition to be ‘a light unto nations’ and its desire to expand its borders. Drawing on declassified documents, personal archives and interviews, this epic history demonstrates how military service binds Israelis to lifelong loyalty and secrecy, making democracy a hostage to the armed forces. A compelling study of character, rivalry, conflict and the competing impulses for war and peace in the Middle East. Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on upper trimmed edge.

Throughout Germany in the early hours of 10 November 1938, thousands of synagogues were burned and tens of thousands of Jewish shops ransacked. Drawing on newspapers, diplomatic reports and more than 50 eyewitness accounts, the eminent historian Martin Gilbert demonstrates how this ‘spontaneous’ outbreak of anti-Semitic violence was actually a carefully orchestrated prelude to the Holocaust. The scale of the destruction, and the deportations that followed, are shown in 25 maps.

When India became a free nation in August 1947 many doubted would it survive. Journalist and broadcaster Mihir Bose analyses how the country transformed into one capable of rivalling China as the pre-eminent economic superpower.

Between the February and October revolutions of 1917, a disparate group of foreigners were trapped amid the violent turmoil in St Petersburg. Among them were the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan and his wife Georgina, Emmeline Pankhurst, Isaiah Berlin, the American journalist Bessie Beatty, and Philip Jordan, the black valet of the US ambassador. Drawing on their largely unpublished letters and diaries, this book presents a first-hand, day-by-day account of a society on the brink of transformation.

In 1917, 50,000 Czech and Slovak army veterans found themselves stranded in Siberia as the Russian Empire disintegrated. Determined to reach the West, they seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railway… Drawing on first-hand accounts, this book tells the gripping story of a little-known episode of the First World War, in which a band of soldiers posed what Trotsky considered the greatest threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and realized their dream of an independent Czecho-Slovakia.

Research Professor Dominic Lieven writes from the premise that ‘World War I was the source and origin of most of the catastrophes that subsequently afflicted twentieth-century Russia’. Drawing on unprecedented study of Russian and other foreign archives, this powerful investigation explores the mindset of those who made the decision to go to war, and sheds new light on the origins of a conflict that would determine the course of world history for a century. (Previously published as Towards the Flame.) Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

In 1916, the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, signed an agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire after the First World War in the event of an Allied victory. It was one of the most controversial and divisive treaties of the 20th century. In this biography of Sir Mark Sykes (1879–1919) his grandson uses family correspondence to reappraise the diplomat’s life and work and his largely misunderstood role in the Middle East.

Many Americans fought in the Spanish Civil War – on both sides. This book tells the stories not only of famous names like Hemingway, but also of a 19-year-old Kentucky woman, a Pennsylvania student, and the Texas oilman who fuelled Franco’s army.

From the First World War, when he fought in the Ottoman Army, to the 1948 war for Palestine, the military leader Fawzi Al-Qawuqji was highly influential in the Arab nationalist struggle. Drawing on published memoirs and private papers, this biography unravels the complexities of this controversial figure.

Ranging from Louis XIV’s wars in the 17th century to the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen, this study examines why some rulers resort to excessive force, whether through ambition, bloodlust or bad advice, and its consequences for global stability .

In this concluding volume of the Makers of the Modern World: The Peace Conferences of 1919–23 and Their Aftermath series, Alan Sharp investigates some of the most significant, long-term legacies and contributions of the peace treaties signed at the end of the First World War, including the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations.

In ten essays, this volume explores aspects of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, including the writings of Mirza Fatali Akhundzade, Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani’s political thought, the use of photography, and the influence of Iranian contacts with the West and modernity.

Updated in 1993 to cover the collapse of Russian Communism, Professor Daniels’s compilation of almost 200 documents, with accompanying introductions and commentaries, sets in context texts that begin with Lenin arguing against the Populists in 1894, trace the progress of the Bolshevik Revolution and the course of Soviet Communism up to the era of perestroika, and end with Gorbachev’s speech of resignation on 8 December 1991.

In this updated edition of his 1996 study, the former British Ambassador to Washington explores the history and nature of the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries 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 and conflict, 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.

Adventurer, seductress and spy, the Russian baroness Moura Budberg embarked on a passionate affair in 1918 with Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British agent plotting Lenin’s downfall. Based on previously unexamined letters, diaries and documents, and narrated with the pace of a thriller, this first-ever biography tells the incredible story of a woman whose lovers included Maxim Gorky and HG Wells, and who became embroiled in the web of scandal surrounding the Cambridge Five.

Rudolf Hoess was Commandant of Auschwitz from its construction in 1940 until late 1943, and supervised the murder of over three million Jews as part of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’. He was an expert in the administration of concentration camps and mass exterminations. Hoess wrote this autobiography in 1947 while in prison in Poland. He was tried, sentenced and hanged later that year. The autobiography and other documents are translated here by Constantine Fitzgibbon, with an introduction by Primo Levi.

The Nobel-Prizewinning author Svetlana Alexievich presents a unique form of oral history in which she has drawn together hundreds of interviews into a cohesive, flowing narrative. Secondhand Time tells the stories of ordinary Russians over the two decades that followed the fall of communism in 1991. Their testimony speaks of joys and sorrows, triumphs and tragedies as the belief system that shaped their whole lives was discredited. Off-mint with American-cut pages and a felt-tip mark on the lower trimmed edge.

With personal access to world leaders over a period of nearly 70 years, the Queen has witnessed profound political changes as well as experiencing crises in her own family, such as the assassination of Louis Mountbatten and the death of Princess Diana. With historical notes and profiles of leading figures, this photographic biography explores the pageantry and the intrigues of the House of Windsor from the abdication crisis to the Diamond Jubilee.

On 5 March 1939, Colonel Segismundo Casado launched a coup against Juan Negrin's Republican government, which he falsely accused of being a puppet of the Communists. Although the defeat of the Republic was already in sight, Casado's decision destroyed any chance of a negotiated peace ending the Spanish Civil War, and it was to cause a massive loss of life. Here a leading historian of 20th-century Spain gives the first detailed account in English of this shocking – and avoidable – tragedy.