World War II was global warfare on an unimaginable scale, generating suffering, deprivation and death of almost limitless dimensions. Not even the Great War saw such barbaric cruelty and atrocity. 100 million men, and a smaller number of women, entered the theatre of war fighting with weapons that had been honed in the earlier conflict, while bombing, deportation, requisitioning and theft completely overturned domestic structure and infrastructure. Coercion, torture and genocide were carried out by regular servicemen and women and the police. The author goes beyond the view of war that sees Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military as causes of crisis, and looks at the broader historical forces that prompted the Axis states to undertake imperial territorial conquest. The conflict goes back to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and continued a decade after "Victory in Europe" in 1945, with its course being influenced by the civil wars raging in China, Ukraine, Italy and Greece. The author is a major authority on World War II and his argument in this magisterial book is that the long Second World War was the last imperial war. Imperial crises frame the origins and course of the conflict and the outcome ended half a millennium of colonialism. The books starts with the fracturing of trade and finance in the 1920s combined with growing nationalist ideology, particularly in Germany where Hitler blamed the Jews for frustrating his ambitions. The hostility of both the US and Soviet Union, on opposite sides, to the survival of traditional colonial empires was key to the eventual outcome. The progress of the war provides the author with a frame for thematic chapters exploring the wider experience of the conflict. How did states mobilise the colossal manpower and material resources? How did states, parties and individuals justify extreme barbarity? What did the war do emotionally and psychologically to those sucked into it? Along the way the author examines issues such as the role of the BBC and intelligence services, and the contribution of partisans and resistance fighters, particularly in the Pacific where barbarity was extreme. Almost a third of the female partisans in Italy were wounded or killed. A huge 990pp, illus.

With exemplary Cases From Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, the author starts this compelling study with the story of her grandfather Morris Greenfield and the way he survived the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. Somehow he finally made it to the United States in 1930, fleeing from the onset of the Holocaust. Morris was not a rebel, but put his talents to adapting. Anti-semitism was a fact of his life, but it failed to crush him. Jewish children were excluded from the school in his Russian village, but the Orthodox priest sneaked him into class. In 1907 he was drafted and found himself in Vladivostok, where the antisemitism he encountered prompted him to desert and head for America, travelling by train and crossing to Shanghai, then taking a German ship to Naples and New York. He was supported by his brother who was already there and had sent him money, but returned to visit his widowed mother and found himself in a military prison. Morris got away during the civil war and survived a series of picaresque adventures hand to mouth, supplying authorities with commodities in return for protection, and finally with his wife returned to America for good. In the main part of the book the author considers three more cases in which anti-semitism constituted a challenge not only to Jews but also to gentiles confronted with its extreme consequences. Frequently Jews were caught up in the bind between fighting for civil rights within their native country, and asserting the right to their own communal and cultural identity within the nation state. The first of the author's three examples focuses on the resistance of early 20th century Russian intellectuals against discrimination, in partnership with Jewish leaders and the newly created state Duma. The second follows the 1927 Paris trial of Russin-born Sholem Schwarzbard who shot and killed the ex-Ukrainian leader as an act of vengeance on behalf of Jews. The trial focused on whether this was justified. Finally the author examines reactions to the legacy of Andrzej Bobkowski when his memoirs were revealed to have had anti-semitic elements edited out. 260pp, paperback.

In 1936 the abdication of King Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson dramatically divided public opinion. One of the King's high-profile supporters was Winston Churchill, who had tears in his eyes when he visited Edward as he prepared to leave his flamboyant Windsor residence Fort Belvedere for the last time. A friend of the Duke remarked that "there was nothing in him which understood the intellectual or spiritual sides of life", and several people, including Wallis, described him as never having progressed beyond boyhood. Wallis confided to a friend, "Can you imagine a more terrible fate than to have to live up publicly to the legend of a love you don't feel?" This fascinating book tells the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they now became, in the years following the abdication. Edward initially stayed with the Rothschilds, running up huge bills which no-one knew who was supposed to pay for. The Rothschilds' patience disappeared when Edward started to play the bagpipes at 3 am. Following marriage to Wallis, the couple travelled round Europe staying with friends, some of whom were Fascists. Wallis's lawyer worked for Hitler's top officials and the couple's Nazi sympathies were viewed with alarm. The couple were not to be invited to any embassy. In August 1939 the Duke telegraphed Hitler asking him not to go to war, to which Hitler replied that the "correct channel" must be found. When war broke out, Mountbatten took his destroyer across the channel to collect the couple. The Duke was reluctantly despatched to be governor of the Bahamas. En route they stayed in Portugal, where their security was ordered to shoot them if they fell into German hands during visits to the casino. In the Bahamas the couple lived a rackety lifestyle which included an unsolved murder in their entourage, and after the war they followed a monotonously swinging lifestyle in Paris. Archive photos, 410 pages.

For over two centuries, the 'Irish question' has dogged UK politics. Although the Good Friday Agreement carved a fragile peace from the bloodshed of the Troubles, the Brexit process has shown a largely uncomprehending British audience just how uneasy that peace always was, and thrown new light on Northern Ireland's uncertain constitutional status. Remote from the British mainland in its politics, economy and cultural attitudes, Northern Ireland is in effect an antechamber, its place within the UK conditional on the border poll guaranteed by the peace process. As shifting demographic trends erode the once-dominant Protestant-Unionist majority, making a future referendum a racing certainty, the reunification of Ireland becomes a question of not if but when, and how. In this new, fully updated edition, Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue and questions that have remained unasked and perhaps unthought must now be answered. A well argued book in terms of economics and the effect of the Scottish breakaway. 234pp, paperback.

Mariella Novotny was found dead with her face in a bowl of milk pudding in February 1983. She was in the process of writing her memoirs. 'It's dynamite!' Christine Keeler said, 'I think it was murder...most probably by the CIA.' In 1961, Mariella was an underage hooker engaging in sexual relations with President John F. Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world. She was believed to be part of a vice ring set up by an alleged Communist agent who was also a well-known British film producer. FBI officers called their investigation 'The Bow-Tie Case'. Two years later the young 'Monroe lookalike' played a major part in another sex scandal with implications for national security - the Profumo Affair. Mariella was the hostess of the Man in the Mask party. She was a close friend of Stephen Ward, the osteopath and pander to high society, another putative whistle-blower who died in suspicious circumstances. In the late 1960s, she gave birth to the illegitimate child of Eddie Chapman (Agent Zigzag), England's most successful wartime double agent. Between 1975 and 1978 she was working undercover for Operation Countryman, an investigation into police corruption in the Flying Squad. Her chief target was the author's grandfather, Charlie Taylor, a London conman who had high-ranking officers in his deep pockets. Mariella brought them all down. An excerpt from the chapter entitled Black Power and Rotting Hill: 'Michael came to London. He worked his way into the veins of criminal society. In Notting Hill, he managed prostitutes, ran gambling houses, sold drugs and collected rent for the property racketeer Peter Rachman, who had already had a go at bedding Mariella and blackmailing Hod.' Includes colour photos including Soho in the early 60s and Mariella on her wedding day to Hod Dibben. 253 pages.

A remarkable collection of interpretations by outstanding writers on the literature and history of modern Britain: Prince Albert, John Spurling on one man's Raj, editing the English Historical Review, Andrew Roberts on Michael Roberts and the BBC, Jeremy Lewis on David Astor and the Observer, Ferdinand Mount on John Keats, Anthony Trollope, readers, writers and reputations, Robert Graves's war poems, Paul Levy on Bloomsbury Reassessed, Edmund Gosse and R. J. Ackerley, Ivy Compton-Burnett, the world of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Harry Potter, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the breakup of Britain, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Margaret Thatcher's impact on historical writing, Tony Benn, and Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Lady Thatcher and Max Hastings on Elizabeth II, the book concludes with British studies at the University of Texas 1975-2013. We are taken on an excursion through British life and intellectual biography covering personalities, politics and culture in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but also the interaction of British and other societies throughout the world. 400 pages, illus.

Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 550 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a cinema and library to a tennis court and shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some 800 of them were evicted and led, one by one, to prison or to their deaths. Unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment, and written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Drawing on letters, diaries and interviews and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, the book weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies and reigns of terror. The residents had enjoyed privileged childhoods, fell in love and married, rose to power, then betrayed each other and were arrested and shot and we learn about the peculiar nature of Bolshevism and get a new history of Russia in this massive chronicle of the soviet era. 1104pp, photos and maps, this is an even more important history given the state-sponsored terrorism of Putin and current politics and government in Russia.

How can our unquenchable thirst for status explain cults, moral panics, conspiracy theories, the rise of social media and the 'culture wars' of today?' Bursting with insights into the hierarchy-crazed hellscape of a world shaped by social media, this book confirms Will Storr's own status as a master storyteller.' - Helen Lewis. What drives our political and moral beliefs? What makes us like some things and dislike others? What shapes how we behave and misbehave in groups? What makes you, you? For centuries, philosophers and scholars have described human behaviour in terms of sex, power and money. Will Storr radically turns this thinking on its head by arguing that it is our irrepressible craving for 'status' that ultimately defines who we are. When we exist as workers in the globalised economy, and citizens of online worlds, the need for status has always been wired into us. This dramatically affects not only our happiness and wellbeing but also our physical health. Without sufficient status we become more ill and live shorter lives. It's an unconscious obsession that drives the best and worst of us - our innovation, arts and civilisation as well as our murders, wars and genocides. Storr takes us on a breathtaking journey through time and culture and he is one of the finest science writers being published today. 405pp.

Officially entitled 'Manifesto of a Communist Party', an 1848 political manifesto by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this originally laid out the programme of the Communist League. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of Communism's potential future forms. It contains their theories about the nature of society and politics, and briefly features ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then finally Communism. A bestselling classic that belongs in everyone's library, this beautifully designed illustrated edition includes an Introduction describing the pamphlet's enduring relevance to the tumultuous landscape of modern politics. English translation, with hundreds of colourful images. 160pp, 10.5 x 17.15cm.

What are governments for? To protect their citizens from harm and to guarantee them a framework in which to live their lives safely and fairly? But not everyone sees it that way. From deep states, governments are merely the vehicles by which they advance their interests - citizens by contrast are merely pedestrians to be knocked over if they get in the way. The book begins with Ancient Greece and Rome and ends around the time of the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA then the UK's Brexit referendum of 2016. Aristocratic vested interests are the oldest examples we have, arising in the classical world as a reaction to the then-novel experiments in government we call today democracy and republicanism. Military deep states came next and have never really gone away, with a lineage running from the Praetorian Guard of the Roman world to the generals controlling Egypt, Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar and elsewhere. From there, the bad actors come thick and fast. But who runs our lives and what secrets are governments hiding from us? Are we really being manipulated by a 'deep state'? When democratic governments are elected, do you ever wonder why they don't seem able to change very much? Over time, special interest groups, unfettered by legal norms or public opinion, have formed 'states within a state' to advance their own private agendas. Unaccountable and immensely powerful, they have changed the course of history. Ian Fitzgerald takes us on an incredible journey as we encounter drug traffickers in Columbia and Mexico, the power-brokers of Western democracies, and the military-industrial complexes of Egypt, Pakistan and North Korea. A revealing and informative introduction to the sinister, secret powers that rule the world. 256pp in well illustrated large softback.