While the First World War is generally seen as the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century, William Mulligan looks anew at the aspirations of the statesmen, soldiers, intellectuals and civilians who were involved in the war and at the new ideas about peace that emerged. Beginning with the collapse of ‘great power peace’ between 1911 and 1914, he shows how the experience of the war expanded the understanding of peace, focusing political attention on building a better world order.

The Daily Mail’s Berlin correspondent Rothay Reynolds was one of the first journalists to interview Hitler and, it was said, the only man capable of holding the Führer’s gaze. As his paper became increasingly vocal in its support for the Nazis, he struggled to report accurately on life in Germany. This account tells the story of Reynolds and other foreign correspondents such as Norman Ebutt and Hugh Carleton Greene who attempted to reveal the truth about the regime, often at great personal risk.

A civil war, the end of slavery and mass immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century caused far-reaching social unrest in America, with race riots, gang violence and organized crime in the eastern cities to rival and exceed the lawlessness of the wild frontier. This study analyses a number of flashpoints including pitched street battles between rival immigrant gangs, the activities of the early mafia and industrial disputes such as the Blair Mountain coal miners' uprising.

While the First World War raged in Europe, the devastating ‘Spanish flu’ suddenly overwhelmed the world; in three successive waves it would kill around 100 million people. This history of the pandemic traces its origins and progress, using information from official documents and the personal accounts of those, such as David Lloyd George and Vera Brittain, who lived through it. The book also follows today’s scientists as they investigate the virus and draw lessons for our response to future pandemics.

Rome, 1922: two men assume power in their respective spheres, the sacred and the secular. Superficially, Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini could not have been less alike, yet they shared a social conservatism and hatred of democracy. Combining meticulous research in the Vatican archives with narrative drive, this groundbreaking history reveals the controversial truth of their unholy alliance, and how, as Il Duce grew closer to Hitler, the ailing pontiff began to sense that something had gone terribly wrong… American-cut pages.

When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, it was not only the city’s art treasures that aroused their greed, but the belongings of ordinary people, especially Jews. A photograph album discovered in German archives systematically recorded the pillage. Reproduced here with an informative commentary, it offers a chilling insight into the relation between greed and mass destruction, as furniture, toys, saucepans and bedlinen are loaded into crates and trucks by Nazi officers, French collaborators and prisoners from the camps.

For the Hungarian historian and journalist Victor Sebestyen, 1946 was the year that shaped the modern world: ideologies and an Iron Curtain divided East and West, India was moving towards independence, European empires were dying, the Chinese communists were nearing victory, and the decision was taken to create a Jewish homeland. Sebestyen’s authoritative study evokes the beginning of the Cold War in the devastated aftermath of the Second World War and shows how decisions made in 1946 continue to affect our world.

As battle raged in North Africa and Italy, Churchill and Roosevelt disagreed about how to win the war. Drawing on new research, this history – the second volume in a trilogy on FDR’s wartime leadership – overturns 70 years of received wisdom to reveal a strategic difference between the two men, as the president challenged Churchill’s decision to widen the war in the Mediterranean in favour of an invasion of France the following year.

Since the Second World War, beneath a veneer of unity, France has pursued a secret rivalry with Britain and the US. Drawing on original archive sources, and interviews with diplomats and foreign policy experts, this revealing study demonstrates how, covertly, France has supported their enemies on the international stage, selling arms to Biafran rebels in Nigeria and to Argentina during the Falklands War, and stoking the tensions that led to the Rwandan genocide.

In 1962, a year after the Berlin Wall went up, a group of young West Germans risked imprisonment, torture and death to liberate friends, lovers and even strangers from the East. Based on interviews with the participants, and previously unavailable Stasi and CIA files, this history tells how two US TV networks financed their tunnel-building in return for the rights to screen the escapes, and how JF Kennedy’s White House, fearful of confrontation with Russia, tried to suppress the results.

Between 1945 and 1990, the Western Allies flew modified transport aircraft along the Berlin Air Corridors and Control Zone, gathering intelligence on Soviet and East German military targets. Illustrated with 66 photographs from the period, this book presents the first detailed account and analysis of this Allied aerial espionage over East Germany and Berlin, 1945–1990.

In telling the life story of Elizabeth II, Andrew Marr is concerned with the influences on her and 'why she does what she does'. The result is a study of the monarchy that chronicles the Queen's pivotal role at the centre of state, which is largely hidden from the public gaze, and makes a strong case for the institution itself. Marr presents a vivid account not only of Elizabeth II, but also of the country she has reigned over for six decades.

Edward Windsor, the former king, and Wallis Simpson were already an embarrassment to the establishment, and their connections to leading Nazis during the 1930s were too damaging to the crown to be allowed to surface after the war. This investigative report reveals their links to Nazi sympathizers and examines Hitler's plan to install Edward as a puppet king. The title refers to flowers apparently sent by German diplomat von Ribbentrop to Simpson commemorating their love affair.

In August 1961, on the day before his baby son’s funeral, KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky boarded an S-Bahn train into West Berlin. By nightfall he had defected into the hands of the American military, confessing to murdering two Ukrainian dissidents using a cyanide-loaded poison gun. Drawing on recently declassified material from CIA and KGB archives, Plokhy’s thrilling story charts Stashynsky’s rise as a willing assassin, his nail-biting escape and its impact on Cold War politics.

Since the beginning of passenger air travel, photographers have recorded the rich and famous as they arrive at their destination. These 300 images from the Press Association's archives form a gallery of 20th-century celebrity, from Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

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.

When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, the exiled Lenin immediately began planning to return from Zurich to Petrograd. Sensing an opportunity to throw Russia into greater chaos, the German government allowed the Bolshevik leader to cross their country in a sealed railway carriage. Merridale tells the story of this world-changing journey and delves into the archives to uncover the underground conspiracy, illicit finance and wartime desperation that combined to make Lenin’s return possible.

First published in 1958 and reissued in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Moorehead’s much-acclaimed book provides the general reader with a concise and straightforward account of the Revolution and events leading up to it, and explores the German connections with the Bolsheviks. Alan Moorehead (1910–1983) was a renowned war correspondent, essayist and historian; his book remains a very readable narrative of 1917, but also sheds light on Western attitudes to the USSR during the Cold War.

Constance Kell was married to Britain’s first spymaster for over 40 years, and after his death in 1941 she wrote this heartfelt account of her husband’s life and work. Drawing on Kell’s diaries, the book covers his postings abroad to Russian, Japan and China, and his time as head of MI5 during which, as stories here attest, the service successfully outwitted scores of foreign intelligence agents.

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, debunking claims that it was the Nazis themselves, and concluding 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.

Approaching the First World War from a global perspective, this collection of 28 essays seeks to explain how each of the participating countries that signed the first Versailles peace treaty on 28 June 1919 came to be there, or, in the case of Russia and China, why they were absent. Starting with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, chapters describe how the major states reacted to events in Sarajevo and how countries such as Greece, Portugal and Brazil entered the war.

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.

In the years before the First World War, British journalist Hector Bywater used his role as naval correspondent for the New York Herald to bluff his way into dockyards and naval installations across Germany. He would memorize important details then report his findings back to MI6 in London. First published in 1931, these remarkable memoirs recount Bywater’s years as an active secret service agent for the Royal Navy.

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.

As one country after another fell to Hitler's armies, war reached deep into the lives of ordinary men and women. This book shows how no two occupations were the same, from the state collaboration of France to the dismemberment of Poland. Drawing on letters, diaries and first-hand accounts, it examines how civilians struggled to understand their predicament, to decide whether to collaborate or resist, and how they justified their choices. Off-mint with a felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Otto Schrag and his son Peter fled Nazi-occupied Belgium in 1939, yet both have very different stories to tell. Otto fled to the South of France where, as a Jew, he was interned in a French concentration camp at Saint-Cyprien; ten-year-old Peter, meanwhile, escaped to Boulogne with his mother and grandmother, sheltering in a cellar while the city was bombed. This book combines Otto’s novel-like recollections, written in 1941, with Peter’s thoughtful memoir compiled 40 years later.

Suzanne Spaak was born into an affluent Belgian Catholic family and married into the country's leading political dynasty. In occupied Paris she mingled with the cultural elite while leading a double life. Drawing on archive documents and eyewitness testimonies, this biography tells how she used her wealth and social status to create a clandestine network that saved hundreds of Jewish children from the gas chambers, before she herself paid the ultimate price for her courage.

On VE Day, 8 May 1945, Winston Churchill was the victorious leader who had led 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 absorbing 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.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War, Britain viewed the nationalist insurgencies shaking its dwindling colonial possessions as Soviet-backed subversion. Drawing on a wealth of top-secret documents and previously overlooked personal papers, this groundbreaking history charts the crucial but unseen role of MI5 in the violent campaigns waged by British troops in the jungles of Malaya and Kenya and on the streets of Aden, Cyprus and Palestine, uncovering some of the darkest secrets of the dying empire. Off-mint.

Gibraltar has been an indispensable naval fortress since 1704, yet in July 1940 it was threatened on four sides: by Vichy France, Nazi Germany, and fascist Italy and Spain. This history of the Rock’s strategic importance during the war also explores the pre-war imperial incursions in the Mediterranean region, which would threaten Gibraltar as a wartime escape route and key link in the ‘steel chain of sea power’.

‘It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.’ Che Guevara’s classic manual on the principles of guerrilla warfare, which explains tactics, logistics and the social responsibility of the guerrilla fighter, reads not only as a call to arms for the oppressed, but as a justification of the Cuban Revolution itself. Off-mint.

Beginning with the dramatic events of 10 May 1940 and the beginning of the coalition government with Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, Roger Hermiston provides a meticulously researched account of the men and women of Churchill’s war ministry, among them Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Anthony Eden, Lord Beaverbrook and Ellen Wilkinson: ‘the government that would win the war’.

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 this 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, it examines how, in recent years, the country has begun to come to terms with its past.

An historian and parish priest, Dr Robert Beaken gives a detailed account of the impact of the First World War on life in the ancient garrison town of Colchester, focusing on the parish churches and their response to the challenges of wartime.

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.

Volume three of Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy, but complete within itself, Farewell the Trumpets charts the decline and dissolution of the British Empire. Beginning with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and detecting the first signs of decay in the Boer Wars, the book follows the diminishing empire through world wars, the loss of India and the death of Winston Churchill in 1955 to ‘a somewhat tattered conclusion’ in the 1960s. Slightly off-mint.

Contrary to recent historical consensus, which argues that Britain’s entry into the First World War was unavoidable, this well-researched, forensic examination of political events in Britain during the 13 days leading up to outbreak, reveals that key politicians and organizations, including cabinet members, Kier Hardy and Liberal Party ‘Radicals’, offered a path to neutrality, and proposes that political blunders and misguided allegiances to France and Russia resulted in a catastrophic conflict that was far from inevitable.

How did a continent at the summit of its prosperity and security plunge itself not once, but twice in a generation, into wars of unprecedented savagery and destructive power? In this eighth volume in the Penguin History of Europe series, one of Britain’s most acclaimed historians provides a narrative of events and profiles the key decision-makers, offering a clear analysis of the underlying forces that drove them. Off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Between 1900 and 2000 our world changed beyond recognition. In chronological order, this handbook takes the reader through two world wars, political and social revolution, economic globalization, and unprecedented technological and medical advances, and identifies key figures and pivotal moments. From the Wright Brothers to the web, and from the age of empires to climate change, it explains the forces that shaped the way we live now.

The American experience of the Vietnam War is widely known, but the Vietnamese people's own story of that brutal and drawn-out conflict is rarely told. This classic work of oral history, first published in 1986, brings together the accounts of ordinary people from both North and South Vietnam - soldiers, guerrillas, monks, opposition leaders, propaganda chiefs and village secretaries - to reveal the profound trauma and remarkable resilience of a nation in the grip of war and revolution.

This detailed account of 16 days in late 1956 juxtaposes the Hungarian Uprising and the Suez Crisis (or Second Arab-Israeli War) which, though thousands of miles apart, were both driven by Cold War tensions and threatened the precarious stability between the USA and USSR. Alex Von Tunzelmann’s tense narrative, which switches rapidly between locations (London, Tel Aviv, Washington, Budapest, etc.), describes the powerplay between protagonists, including Ben-Gurion, Eden, Eisenhower, Nasser and Nagy, which resulted in conspiracy, assassination and bloodshed.

Our view of the Holocaust is shaped by the industrialized death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka, but the reality was more complex. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies, this revelatory study moves the focus from the forests of Eastern Europe to the transient networks of the Reich’s railways, to reveal how the location and the methods of genocide altered in the course of the war – and how our perceptions of it have shifted over subsequent decades.

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.

In many ways Winston Churchill and South African statesman Jan Smuts were opposites: one a privileged Englishman with expensive tastes, the other a temperate philosopher of far humbler origins. Yet in matters of state their politics, military judgment and vision of Empire intersected, making possible a friendship which not only endured for almost half a century, but which influenced the outcome of two world wars and the transition from Empire to Commonwealth, as this account of their relationship attests.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Foley worked as Chief Passport Control Officer for the British Embassy in Berlin, a cover for his role as MI6 Head of Station there. As the Nazi administration increased its stranglehold over the country, Foley used his position to issue visas to countless Jews, allowing them to escape to Britain ‘legally’. This biography also recounts many of the escapes that Foley enabled.

‘In Britain…1914–18 has become a literary war, detached from its moorings in historical events.’ In this study, David Reynolds seeks to redress the balance and broaden our vision by demonstrating how the First World War shaped the 20th century at home and abroad, through the widening of the democratic franchise, the creation of states in Europe and the Middle East, and the establishment of an ‘international order’; and how it paved the way for another, greater conflict.

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.

As official 'court' photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann played a critical role in cultivating the Führer's public image; he was also a close personal friend of Hitler, with intimate access to his inner circle from 1923 to April 1945. First published in 1955, Hoffmann's memoirs, illustrated here with a selection of his informal photographs, offer a remarkable behind-the-scenes account of Hitler and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. With a new introduction by Roger Moorhouse. Translated by RH Stevens.