Showing titles in 20th Century

'[An] elegant and forensic double portrait setting Greene, that sociologist of sin, alongside the Kremlin's golden boy Philby, with the lengthening shadow of the cold war falling between them ... both his subjects make for terrific copy ... Part of the pleasure of Verkaik's book is the vicarious...

Bloomsbury presents The Collapse of Yugoslavia by Alastair Finlan, read by Ric Jerrom. An accessible introduction to the brutal conflict in the former Yugoslavia, one of the greatest yet least understood tragedies of the 20th century. In 1991, an ethnically diverse and peaceful region of Europe...

Anyone living in Rhodesia during the 1960s and 1970s would have had a father, husband, brother, or son called up in the defense of the war-torn, landlocked little country. A few of these brave men would have been members of the elite and secretive unit that struck terror into the hearts of the ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas infiltrating the country at that time - the Selous Scouts. 

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Passchendaele by Nick Lloyd, read by Mark Elstob. Between July and November 1917, in a small corner of Belgium, more than 500,000 men were killed or maimed, gassed or drowned - and many of the bodies were never found. The Ypres offensive represents the...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER From bestselling historian Saul David, a riveting new history of the British airborne experience across the Second World War. The legendary ‘Red Devils’ were among the finest combat troops of the Second World War. Created at Churchill’s instigation in June 1940...

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of...

For 200 years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism’s long journey from its 19th-century roots to today’s fractured political moment.

Brought to you by Penguin. The definitive new history of East Germany by an acclaimed historian In 1990, a country disappeared. For the previous forty-one years, East Germany had existed in Western minds as more of a metaphor than a place, more of a grey communist blur than a land of real people...

When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz, of Dachau; and when they think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, they think of Nuremberg. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this idyllic, peaceful Ukrainian city, which is fitting, because it is also where the Holocaust actually began.

THE PHENOMENAL INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER M. is a startling look into the fascist mindset, a portrait of unrelenting determination, and an impeccable work of historical fiction. Italy is exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of the inept moderates and the agonizing machinations of a...

The Sunday Times Bestseller 'Quite simply the most important book you will read this year' Hazel Gaynor 'An extraordinary read' Lorraine Kelly 'Deeply moving' Daily Mail 'Mama, it's me.' I held her hand in mine, hoping it would give her the strength to hold on. Finally, she spoke, her voice...

Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion.

Great Contemporaries profiles towering figures ranging from Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Lawrence of Arabia and Leon Trotsky to Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister, the essays in Great Contemporaries focus on the challenges of statecraft at a time when the democratic revolution was toppling older regimes based on tradition and aristocratic privilege.

Bloomsbury presents The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle by Richard Vinen, read by Charles Armstrong. 'Deeply researched yet highly readable, with fresh and often provocative insights' DAVID REYNOLDS 'A vivid and shrewd reckoning ... setting its assessment in the perspective of today's...

Victory in the Kitchen is a culinary biography: a life lived through food, ranging from rural Berkshire to wartime London, via Belle Epoque Paris and prohibition-era New York. While Georgina Landemare saw herself as ordinary, her accomplishments, and the life she lived, were anything but. She started her career as a nursemaid and ended it cooking for one of the best-known figures in British history, Winston Churchill, a man to whom food was central as a diplomatic tool in a time when the world was embroiled in a worldwide war.

Target Tirpitz is gripping WW2 storytelling at its best and a return to the RAF territory of Patrick Bishop’s bestselling Bomber Boys and Fighter Boys. The Tirpitz, Hitler’s greatest weapon, was reputed to be unsinkable and the battleship inflamed an Allied obsession: to destroy her at any...

The discovery of DNA’s structure is the story of five towering minds in pursuit of the advancement of science, and for almost all of them, the prospect of fame and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and Linus Pauling. Howard Markel skillfully recreates the intense intellectual journey, and fraught personal relationships, that ultimately led to a spectacular breakthrough. But it is Rosalind Franklin - fiercely determined, relentless, and an outsider at Cambridge and the University of London in the 1950s - who becomes a focal point for Markel.

Frank Ledwidge offers a sweeping look at the history of air warfare, introducing the major battles, crises, and controversies where air power has taken center stage and exploring the changes in technology and air power capabilities over time. Considering whether bombing has ever been truly effective, he discusses whether wars can be won from the air and concludes by analyzing whether there is a future for manned air power, or if it is inevitable that drones will dominate 21st-century war in the air.

'Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,' wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding—and contested—writers of the twentieth century. In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth.