20th Century History

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

Giant historical figures such as Churchill and JFK appear to stand alone, but few reach such eminence without the support of a network of public and private relationships, starting with their families. This biographical study begins at Chartwell in the 1930s, with a secret business deal between Churchill and Joseph Kennedy, before exploring the complex links between the two dynasties, shedding new light on a transatlantic alliance that would shape world history. American-cut pages and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

In four substantial essays, Fleming discusses four books that had a significant influence on public opinion on Communism in post-war America and, to a lesser extent, France. The essays cover both the books' arguments and the remarkable – if not always admirable – careers of their authors: they are Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940); Out of the Night (1941) by Richard Krebs aka Jan Valtin; Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom (1946); and Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers.