20th Century History

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.

Muslim and Bengali-speaking Bangladesh was once East Pakistan, created when India achieved independence in 1947. The country gained its own independence from Pakistan in 1971 after a war in which many hundreds of thousands died. More conflict was to follow, exacerbated by natural disaster, famine and corruption. Salil Tripathi, an Indian journalist and Bengali-speaker, presents the first in-depth account of Bangladesh’s struggle for independence and the troubled aftermath.

Blending history, reportage and memoir, the Ojibwe sociologist Treuer challenges the idea that Native American culture ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. By recording the ways that depredations have been resisted over the past century, he demonstrates how land seizures sharpened legal skills; forced assimilation of children was met by a unifying indigenous identity; and most recently, digital technology has become a tool of organized resistance.

Gareth Russell grew up listening to tales of the Titanic from his great-grandfather, who watched the ship rise above the Belfast skyline. Drawing on letters, newspapers and eyewitness reports, he describes the construction of the liner, charts its maiden voyage, and recounts the lives and fates of six first-class passengers: a countess, an actress, the managing director of the Harland & Wolff shipyard, a railroad magnate and his son, and an American philanthropist.

The pivotal year of the First World War was marked by a series of events with far-reaching repercussions, from the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising to the assassination of Rasputin and the election of President Woodrow Wilson. Drawing on military, social and cultural sources, this history goes beyond the Western Front to explore crucial developments in the war at sea, in the intelligence war, and in the Balkans, East Africa and Asia.

The Second World War was one of the most destructive in history, but also one of the most innovative, sweeping away empires and creating new global institutions. Ranging over five continents, this study examines how the war shaped the modern world, inaugurating the arms race and the space race, the United Nations and Bretton Woods, decolonization and globalization. With demagoguery on the rise again, it argues, we cannot afford to ignore this legacy.

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.

Before the Second World War, Herbert Cukurs was a world-famous aviator and a hero in his native Latvia; then he joined the SS and contributed to the genocide of 30,000 Latvian Jews. The Good Assassin uncovers this little-known episode of the Holocaust, before moving forward to the 1960s, when the Israeli secret agent Yaakov Meidad found Cukurs living under an alias in Brazil, and set about bringing him to justice.

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’. Slightly off-mint.

This opening volume of Hamilton’s trilogy, which asserts that Roosevelt’s role during the Second World War has been underestimated, ranges from his meeting with Churchill in Placentia Bay on 9 August 1941 to the landing of US troops in North Africa in late 1942. During this period the president rejected calls to delegate decisions to military leaders, overcame an attempted ‘mutiny’, and demonstrated his talent for strategic thinking by devising a global plan to defeat Hitler.

Hamilton’s reappraisal of Roosevelt’s wartime leadership continues with this second volume in his trilogy, assessing the clashes between FDR and Churchill throughout 1943. As battle escalated in North Africa and Italy, a strategic difference between the two men emerged, with the president challenging Churchill’s decision to widen the war in the Mediterranean and overruling his attempts to abandon the D-Day landings.

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.

Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

In December 1943 Churchill withdrew support from anti-communist partisans in Yugoslavia and threw his weight behind Tito. Using recently declassified documents, this history explains how senior figures in Whitehall and the SOE acted as the Yugoslav leader’s mouthpiece, doctoring or suppressing reports critical of him. It also reveals how Tito’s forces scarcely harassed the German occupiers, but instead used arms provided by Britain to massacre thousands of his opponents during and after the war.

In February 1942, in a Tel Aviv flat, Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton shot Avraham Stern dead. This first biography tells of Stern’s comfortable upbringing as a dentist’s son in small-town Poland, his emigration to Palestine and his commitment to the Zionist cause. It describes the terrorist attacks he organized against British targets, and his subsequent elevation as a martyr to the cause of Israel.

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.

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.

In the 1930s Stalin was obsessed with closing the technology gap between the Soviet Union and the West and recruited Stanislav Shumovsky to join his fledgling espionage and infiltration efforts. ‘Agent Blériot’ enrolled at MIT in 1931 and subsequently stole many of their crucial aviation secrets, allowing Russia to transform its military capacity. Based on documents from the Churchill Archives, and including numerous photographs and maps, this book shows the key role Shumovsky played in establishing the Russian spy network.

Beneath the glamour and hedonism of the Roaring Twenties lay a fear that Britain was under threat from the fledgling Soviet state, and that its agents were everywhere, gathering intelligence and fomenting unrest. Drawing on newly declassified documents, this book uncovers British intelligence’s largest peacetime operation, a spy hunt that cast its net over MPs, aristocrats, the Bloomsbury group, workers and trade unionists, bringing down a government and ending several eminent careers.

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 to commemorate their love affair.

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.

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.

Danny Orbach explores the perennial question of what could have been done to stop Hitler in this exploration of the Third Reich’s anti-Nazi underground. Disparate small groups based on academic, political, personal and religious affiliations tried repeatedly to end the Führer’s genocidal reign. This is their story of the sometimes ingenious but always doomed efforts, looking at the assassination plans and ethical conflicts surrounding the attempts.

During the Second World War, German-occupied Bordeaux was a centre of espionage as the Gestapo attempted to suppress British efforts to support the Resistance. Drawing on recently discovered documents, the late Paddy Ashdown and Sylvie Young reveal the deadly game of pursuit played out by three men – one British, one French and one German – against a backdrop of intrigue and betrayal.

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.

The distinguished historian of revolutionary Russia, Robert Service brings a profound understanding of the period and a forensic examination of official and personal records to this study of Nicholas II’s life and thought in the 16 months after the February 1917 Revolution and his abdication. The book examines the political environments of the Tsar’s places of detention, Irkutsk, Tobolsk and Ekaterinberg; his thinking on Russia and his own role; and the circumstances of the Romanov family’s execution in July 1918.

Lenin, Trotsky and Karensky were the ideological driving force behind the Russian Revolution, but were they, as one of Roy Bainton's sources describes them, 'totally evil men'? Or was Lenin, as a Red Army veteran insisted, 'a good man who ran the country on a worker's wages'? Bainton's brief history approaches the revolution from the standpoint of the ordinary mass of Russians, describing both the bravado of the revolutionaries and a people punished repeatedly by circumstance.

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, Keir Hardie 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.

Brilliant classical scholar Alfred Dillwyn Knox was recruited by the Admiralty as a codebreaker in 1915 and by the outbreak of the Second World War was a leading cryptographer for the Government Code and Cypher School, breaking the Abwehr Enigma at Bletchley Park in 1941. This biography of the eccentric genius is written by one of 'Dilly's girls' - his codebreaking assistants at Bletchley - and describes his life and work, including detailed explanations of his decryption methods.

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.

The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in June 1914, this study argues, brought about far more than the outbreak of the First World War; it sowed the seeds of global insecurity in the 21st century, creating four new ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’: weakened states, economic insecurity, religious and political extremism, and environmental crisis. The remedies it proposes lie in fundamental political and economic reform, and a realignment of US strategic priorities.

Philip Shenon's book pieces together the compelling story of the most important, and most misunderstood, homicide investigation in 20th-century America: the Warren Commission inquiry and its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to assassinate the President. Drawing on unprecedented access to surviving Commission staff and other key witnesses, Shenon reveals how much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has not been told and how much evidence was 'shredded, incinerated or erased' before it reached the Commission. Off-mint.

In this study of Winston Churchill and the small group of men, the 'team of rivals', that he chose to help him guide Britain through the grave crisis it faced in May 1940, Schneer examines Churchill's leadership and the relations between the War Cabinet ministers, among them Eden, Beaverbrook, Bevin, Attlee, Morrison and Stafford Cripps. He also looks beyond the war to the Cabinet's response to public expectations after six years of hardship – domestic issues which demanded a new kind of leadership.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 in the process of transformation.

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.

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.

The Nobel-Prizewinning author Svetlana Alexievich has drawn together hundreds of interviews into a cohesive, flowing narrative to tell the stories of ordinary Russians over the two decades following the fall of communism in 1991. Their testimonies speak of triumphs, sorrows and tragedies as the belief system that shaped their lives was overturned. Off-mint with American-cut pages and a felt-tip mark on the lower trimmed edge.

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.

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.

When, in 1907, Alfred Redl became head of the Austro-Hungarian Intelligence Bureau, he also began working as a secret agent for the Russian Imperial Army. This biography, the first in English, examines possible motivations behind Redl’s treachery, which is often blamed for Austria’s defeat in the First World War and the break-up of its empire. Was Redl an evil, reckless man or the tragic victim of Russian blackmail that threatened to expose his homosexuality?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 history charts the crucial but unseen role of MI5 in the 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 dark secrets of the dying empire. 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’.

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.

Despite its prosperity and security Europe plunged 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.

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.

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.

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.

Written with unprecedented access to high-level sources and secret memos, Cursed Victory chronicles the long and troubled aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel captured the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula. It focuses on critical moments in the military occupation and peace process, showing how early opportunities to conclude a deal were missed and how decisions about the fate of the territories have affected the daily lives of millions.

Tradecraft, or the recruiting and running of agents in the field to gather clandestine information and disrupt the enemy, is rightly associated with secret rendezvous and invisible ink. This intelligent study in British security examines the development of MI5 tradecraft during the interwar period, vital in combatting both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and considers the success of the intelligence service’s most effective sources, including Walter Krivitsky and Maxwell Knight.

Written by Colonel Vaughan of the 7th Rajputs, this is a colourful account of the expedition to relieve the International Legations – 900 soldiers, marines and citizens of eleven foreign powers, including Britain – besieged in Peking for 55 days during the Boxer Uprising. The book covers Vaughan’s perilous march from the coast to Peking, the capture of the Legations Quarter and the subsequent occupation of Peking. An extensive foreword is complemented by maps, photographs and watercolours by the author.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to take aerial photographs of Britain in preparation for an invasion. In 1945 British Intelligence discovered 16 tons of pictures in Bavaria, which were sent to Britain and classified top secret; but other Luftwaffe photographs were found and kept by ordinary servicemen. Here, Nigel Clarke presents approximately 200 such photographs, many with bomb runs marked, along with wartime images of the corresponding damage on the ground. Slightly off-mint.

On 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted in Sing Sing prison, New York, for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Now, for the first time, their spymaster Alexander Feliksov reveals his role in the case, and that of Klaus Fuchs. In this candid and startling memoir, he claims that the Rosenbergs were wrongfully executed, and recounts his subsequent role as a secret messenger between Khrushchev and Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis.

In April 1916, shortly before the Battle of the Somme, a series of explosions ripped through a munitions works on the Kent marshes, killing 108 people and injuring many more. This remarkable book recreates the events of that day, shedding new light on the home front during the Great War. Brian Dillon offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on bodies, buildings, and the earth; and a deeply personal exploration of one of England’s most bleakly beautiful landscapes.

The importance of milestone events such as the discovery of penicillin and the Wall Street crash are considered in this historical review as well as political developments including the Japanese invasion of China and the rise of Fascism in Europe. Writing across 21 topics Philip Ziegler gives a broad overview of the period in a bid to explain how one world war led to another.

After a lifetime of academic writing on the Holocaust, Otto Dov Kulka turns to his own experiences as a child in Auschwitz in this bleakly poetic memoir. Blending personal recollection and historical research, he vividly recreates the grim absurdity of this ‘metropolis of death’, and reveals why the Nazis set up and then liquidated a model ‘family camp’ there.

Few small provincial towns have held such significance in the politics and culture of a nation as Weimar has done in Germany. The home of Goethe and Schiller and the birthplace of the Bauhaus, it also gave its name to the country’s first, short-lived democracy. This richly detailed volume offers the first modern history of this emblematic city, from its role in the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 19th-century Romantic movement, through the Nazi and Soviet eras to the present day.

Although he is usually studied as a political figure, Churchill was a prolific author who won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Literary Churchill offers detailed analysis of his writings and demonstrates the impact of reading and theatre-going on his political goals and methods. In particular, it reveals how the Prime Minister’s rhetoric and critical decisions during the Second World War were influenced by his appreciation of the power of theatrical metaphors and plot devices.

Despite being German and a former member of the Communist Party, Klaus Fuchs was granted British citizenship at the height of the Second World War and invited to contribute to research on the atomic bomb. The physicist moved to America in 1943 to work on the Manhattan Project, all the time passing vital information to the Russians. This biography assesses Fuchs's value as a scientist and as a spy as he traded the greatest secrets of the age.

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.

Does the United States need its massive atomic arsenal in the 21st century? With his extensive experience of nuclear politics, Younger looks back at the development of these weapons of mass destruction.