A heartbreaking, inspirational and uplifting true story of hope and bravery. Only those who have been prisoners have any concept of the horrors of incarceration or the ineffable joy of release. In mid-1943, a British PoW in Germany began cryptic communication back to England with one goal in mind - to establish a secret trust fund that prisoners of war could use in order to purchase their very own Spitfire to soar above them in the skies over occupied Europe. It was to be named Unshackled Spirit, and this aircraft, along with this one man's selfless act, epitomised the courage and strength of thousands of men. The accounts compiled are from a collection of original YMCA personal wartime logs as issued to RAF prisoners of war in 1944. The book draws out the story of each aviator, how they became a prisoner and life in the various camps. Extensive and amazingly detailed pieces of artwork are taken from the logs and illustrated in the book. An important aspect is how agencies helped by supplying all manner of equipment to the thousands of men behind barbed wire. The role of MI9 is revealed and how it participated in those agencies exploring efforts taken to smuggle escape material into camps without breeching the Geneva Convention and finally the extraordinary measures taken to secure intelligence during the process of prisoner repatriation. Shoot the proofreader for some glaring errors in an otherwise interesting book with chapters on Wing Commander Douglas Bader and Warrant Officer Sydney Eric Hamblin and Bernard Howard Nutt among them, the RAF in Buchenwald and Stalag XII. 320pp, well illus.

Following the horrors of the Great War, people wanted to forget its horrors and have fun in any way they could. A young man from a far-off feudal world found entertainment in royal palaces, on battleships and in brothels. During his few months in London, high society and affairs of state were to collide with a city's underworld and a ring of globe-trotting conmen. The scandal that followed rocked the world and its aftermath remains to this day. The young man was Rajah Sir Hari Singh, heir to the Maharajah of Kashmir. His downfall was to meet an adventuress called Maud, and her associates, the Mayfair Mob. When the Rajah came to London in 1919, his first time in Europe, between visits to the King and Queen and the Prince of Wales, he was introduced by his aide de Camp to Mrs Maud, Maudie Robinson. They became lovers and spent Christmas in Paris where they were 'discovered' in bed together. The Rajah parted with cheques to the equivalent today of £14 million in hush money to stop Maudie's husband citing him in a divorce action. The plot was planned by his trusted friend and aide Charles Arthur, an Irish nobleman, along with Monty Newton, a notorious card sharp, and William Cooper Hobbs, a crooked solicitor's clerk and the Mr Big of the London underworld. But were Maudie and her husband also in on the plot? And if so, how were they cheated out of all but £21,000 of the blackmail pay-out? When they found out, the ensuing court case gave Sir Hari a nickname that haunted him forever: 'Mr A'. The British Government imposed the greatest secrecy on the case, keeping files closed for 70 and 100 years rather than the usual 30. Records only recently released by the National Archives throw new light on the court case that gripped the world for eight days in 1924 and which was to have repercussions that last to this day in the fraught relations between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Monty was saved by the intervention of his partner in crime Lemoine, a German working for French Intelligence who, in 1931, bought the working manuals of the new German Enigma encoding machine from a clerk so that, in 1932, a young Polish mathematician could crack the code. This is five years before Alan Turing even thought of studying cryptology. The book follows Newton and Lemoine around the world from Monte Carlo to Mexico, always staying in the best hotels, as they con the rich and gullible out of their millions. 288pp, photos.

'Personal Encounters With An Architect of Genocide', this is a chilling portrait of Radovan Karadzic, giving us an eye-opening new context not only for the Bosnian War, but also how fear can be harnessed and diverted to violent political ends. A remarkable blend of biography, history and psychiatry, the book is based on extraordinary access to a notorious Serbian leader and is scrupulously researched by this skilled interviewer. Stern explores the boundaries of good and evil through hours of interviews with the convicted mass murderer and complex emotions are unleashed on both sides as the interviewer circles a wily subject charmed at skill, obfuscation, misdirection and intimidation. It is an investigation into the nature of violence, terror and trauma. Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held this series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with the Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes. The encounter would alter her understandings of the mechanics of fear, motivations of violence and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities on a state level who target non-combatants in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbours? What happens when an ethnic or racial group loses its dominant position in society? How do leaders harness fear and weaponize it and target minorities with violence? What is the 'eco system' that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders and could anything about their personal histories, personalities or exposure to historical trauma shed light on their behaviour? Karadzic was once a brilliant and often charming psychiatrist and poet who spent 12 years in hiding, disguising himself as an energy healer. A deeply insightful and chilling book. 304pp.

Sub-titled 'Medieval to Post-Modern Fortifications in the Lands of the Former Roman Empire', this substantial book focusses on key examples in the High and Late Middle Ages in Italy, Wales, Iberia, England, France and the Low Countries. It traces the evolution of castles and fortified sites during the later medieval period from the 12th to the 15th centuries, a period in which fixed fortifications shaped military thinking in a turbulent world. The book begins with a brief history of the Iberian peninsula, the Aragonese/Catalan front, Córdoba and Islamic Iberia before going on to Paris fortified, the Hundred Years War (1337-1153), war in Brittany and Vincennes. The Hundred Years War resumes in the 15th century, Henry V is victorious and there is the French resurgence and conquests by cannon. There is a look at castles on the fringe, west of the Rhine, Italian Renaissance architects to military engineers, the Braye and boulevards, Italian wars in the age of Machiavelli, and how fortifications were of direct strategic and tactical importance wherever there was an attempt to take or hold territory. The factors that influenced their location, layout and construction are analysed and the way they were modified to meet the challenges of new tactics and weapons. 248pp, over 100 colour photos, maps and illustrations.

From the invasion of the Franks and Mongols, this remarkable collection of artifacts and structures tells the story of the conflicts which shaped the nature of the Western World we know today, both in spiritual and geographical terms. Throughout almost the entire Medieval period, the Catholic church sanctioned military campaigns against what it perceived as its enemies. The rise of Islam and its spread across large parts of the Middle East, Asia, North Africa and even the peripheries of Europe saw Muslim warriors seize the Holy Land, occupy Jerusalem and threaten Constantinople. In response, Pope Urban II called for a crusade to retake the Holy Land, the first of nine military campaigns that continued for the next 200 years. Other lesser-known crusades were mounted with the aim of Christianising the more remote regions of northern and north-eastern Europe, as well as against the Cathars in Southern France. The advance of the Ottomans into the Balkans saw further crusades to halt the Muslims in Bosnia and Serbia, the reconquest of Spain from the Muslim Moors, and such diverse theatres of conflict have resulted in an equally diverse number of relics still to be found. Artillery, coats of arms, Crusader-struck coins, the pen boxes of prolific Muslim writers, Yemen and Saladin's bolt holes, camels carrying projectile weapons in Afghanistan, the invention of trebuchets, reliquary caskets decorated with colourful rock crystal, beautifully decorated minbars in the Court of the Mosque, Karak Castle in Jordan, Pisa Cathedral, Europe's oldest active synagogue in Prague, the Bayeux tapestry showing Duke William leading a charge of his Knights, the murder depicted from a 14th century illuminated manuscript and the Great Mosque of Córdoba, we enter a world of emperors, caliphs and sultans. Beautifully written by an acknowledged expert of the period, 100 objects of never seen before. 251 glossy pages, over 200 colour images.

'A beautiful, poignant book about the darkest period in modern Dutch history.' - David de Jong. Nina Siegal gives us a day-to-day narrative of the Holocaust in the Netherlands by splicing together excerpts from a few of the hundreds of diaries stored in an Amsterdam archive. She helps us understand how 75% of the 140,000 Jews in Holland, a prosperous and cultivated Western European country, could have been murdered 'posing a warning for our own deeply fractured country.' - Joseph Berger. The diary journals of collaborators, resisters and the persecuted - a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at the Westerbork Transit Camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives - are made into a non-fictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust. Siegal provides the context, both historical and personal, while trying to make sense of her own relationship to this past. As a 'second generation survivor' born and raised in New York, she attempts to understand what it meant for her mother and maternal grandparents to live through the war in Europe. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam those questions came up again. Why did 75% of the Jewish community perish and how did this square with the narratives of Dutch Resistance she had heard so much about? She takes us into the lives of seven diary writers and follows their pasts into the present through interviews with those who preserved and inherited these diaries. The past is rewritten. Rigorous research and intimate storytelling. 527pp, photos and colour images.

Oliver Cromwell, born a middle-ranking nobody in a declining county family in an obscure part of the country, became the only non-royal ruler of Britain. He organised the only public trial and execution of a king, brutalised parts of the British Isles in an attempt to unite them, changed religious and political life forever, and still divides people today. This book is not a biography of Cromwell but rather follows in his footsteps, both physically and mentally, attempting to work out what was happening in Cromwell's mind as he passed through these physical and political landscapes, always aware of the danger of overreach. The second part of the book considers his reputation after death. Cromwell was both soldier and politician and his actions and ideas still have political and social consequences today. The book begins in Huntingdon in 1599, with the respectable but unimportant Cromwell family living under the shadow of richer relatives. Civil War and Cromwell's controversial successes at Marston Moor, Naseby, Basing House and Worcester transform him into the most powerful person in Britain, and moving him from a modest house in Ely to Hampton Court Palace. Cromwell is involved in the execution of King Charles I outside the Banqueting House, his own coronation in Westminster Hall, and bloody slaughter in Ireland. His death in 1658 does not end the controversy. His enemies take revenge on his corpse and the debate about his legacy begins. 151 page large softback, illus.

Rare photographs from wartime archives, many of which are very distressing showing heaps of dead bodies, elderly Jews, women and children, wearing the star of David waiting selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sonderkommandos assisted the newly arrived transports. The other principal groups of 'helpers' were Kapos and Trawniki. The Nazis' vast concentration camp network and later the Final Solution programme made heavy demands on the SS whose responsibility it was. The use of 'overseers' minimised costs and enabled the camps to run with fewer SS personnel. The super commandoes' duties included unloading Jews from trains, collecting their possessions and sorting them for storage. Under the supervision of the SS, their main assignment was to run the gas chambers and crematoria. The Kapos oversaw the Sonderkommandos. Many were originally prisoner functionaries recruited from violent criminal gangs and they had a well-deserved reputation for brutality. The third group known as Trawniki or Trawnikimänner were Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from Russian PoW camps. While some served in a military capacity, others played an instrumental role in the Holocaust programme, rounding up and transporting Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. Whilst the Sonderkommandos were forced to undertake various grisly tasks, with the added fear of being killed at any moment, the Kapos and Trawniki competed without scruple to maintain the favour of their SS masters while pitting victim against victim. Very little text, the book is in the Images of War series and reproduces approximately 200 rare contemporary archive images of forced labour, known personnel and very harrowing images such as skeletal corpses being dragged in irons by the head and pushed into the oven for incineration (which normally took 45 minutes to one hour). 114pp, large softback.

'With incredible photos from never-before-seen archives which show the SAS in all its remarkable dash and splendour, this is incisive commentary and a fine wartime history. Spiced with sexual and criminal statistics, Joshua Levine reveals a Britain of loose morals, opportunistic pilfering and cheating, and hedonistic pleasure alongside the familiar virtues of courage and community.' - Sunday Telegraph. The SAS began as a lie, a story of a British Parachute Unit in the North African desert to convince the Axis they were under imminent threat. The lie was so effective that soon a small band of men were brought together to make it real, and these recruits were the toughest and brightest of their cohort. Their first commanders, David Stirling and Paddy Mayne, would go down in history as unorthodox visionaries. This book tells much more than the usual origin story and seeks out less well-known leaders like Bill Fraser, who was essential in helping the SAS achieve fame for their devastating raids. Written with the full cooperation of the SAS, and with exclusive access to archives, Joshua Levine includes interviews with veterans and family members and each page gives a visceral sense of what it was like to fight and train in the SAS in both North Africa and Europe during the Second World War, focussing on their failures as well as their successes. Levine's background as an actor, barrister and historian makes him the ideal interlocutor putting his interviewees at ease. 310pp, masses of archive and colour photos.

The hydrogeologist author is a member of the Western Front Association with a special interest in the First World War. Few soldiers on the Western Front had heard of the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Mining and Boring Company, even after it had been renamed the 'Alphabet Company' by an AIF wag, yet many knew the work of this tiny unit which numbered fewer than 300 at full strength. Its influence was enormous and spanned the entire British sector of the Western Front, from the North Sea to the Somme. This is the story of the 'Alphabeticals' who, led by Major Victor Morse DSO, operated and maintained pumps, generators, ventilation fans, drilling equipment and other ingenious devices in the horrendous conditions of the trenches in which the troops lived and fought. These quiet achievers provided unsung services and here is the story of the three Australian tunnelling companies which resulted following the disbandment in May 1916. Many of the uses had never been imagined by the manufacturers and much of these front-line tunnelling activities were generally secret undertakings. The bulk of records relating to the unit were destroyed in a fire just months before they were due to be handed to the War Office so Morse hastily typed up the Unit's history based on his recollections and remnants of records salvaged from the fire. The Alphabet Company arrived in France with 13 electric generating sets, underground ventilation and water pumping equipment, also 40 portable drilling machines and large, steam-powered drilling machines, and their work became increasingly prized and more and more equipment was purchased and more men trained in its operation. Their workplaces were frequently hot, cramped, smelly little dugouts, cellars or roughly constructed lean-tos. The book seeks to do justice to the work of this dynamic little unit. 329pp in large well illustrated softback including archive photos and maps. Please note contents same as code 93260.