Women's lives were transformed during the 100 years between 1850 and 1950. In 1850 a married woman was not legally entitled to own property or assets, and had to hand everything over to her husband, but by 1950 she could graduate from university and enter most professions, retaining control of her own earnings whatever her circumstances. This book about women's emancipation focuses on the women of Plymouth, from the six women MPs during this period, including Nancy Astor who was the first female MP, to the mother of six and wife of an unco-operative husband who informed a survey, "I haven't any outdoor clothes so I chat to neighbours and sit on the back step mending and darning". The Ladies' National Association, originally formed to combat the humiliating treatment of prostitutes, was active in Plymouth particularly in the Nonconformist and Quaker communities. Domestic abuse was a common problem, and in 1923 women were finally allowed to petition for divorce. Overcrowding was a problem and 5,000 people, mainly women, regularly used the public washhouses for washing and drying laundry. By the 1890s there were women's suffrage groups in every town throughout the country, but there was also a vociferous anti-suffrage lobby. Women were active in philanthropic causes and in late 19th century Plymouth there were four women guardians of the local workhouse, though unfortunately they were voted off the board when they refused to allow the children to go to the pantomime. In 1918 many women gave up their jobs to returning soldiers, but the potentiality for independence had been established. 202pp, paperback, photos.

The Design and Careers of Capital Ships of the World's Navies 1880 - 1990. Big and beautifully produced, this is a comprehensive study of 21 capital ships, the most important vessels in a navy's armoury. Each one has a full chapter written by an expert, ranging in time from China's Chen Yuen built in 1882, closely followed by Argentina's Garibaldi (1885), to Italy's 1937 technological showcase Littorio, immortalised in the iconic wartime photo showing her leading her sister ship Vittorio in gunnery exercises. Among the most impressive is the United States' magnificent Missouri ("The Mighty Mo") of 1944, selected by President Truman to be the location of the Japanese surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then ignominiously stranded in 1950 on the Thimble Shoal in Hampton Roads, but finally redeeming her reputation during service in the Korean War. Following a modernisation package in the mid-eighties, Missouri saw action again a few years later in the Persian Gulf, and is now berthed in Pearl Harbor as a naval museum. The British Navy is represented here by the legendary battleship HMS Hood, commissioned in 1920, and representing a 130 per cent increase in displacement compared with the earlier HMS Dreadnought. Cutting edge technology combined with advanced design to make this one of the most beautiful battleships, seen at her best in an aerial shot above Scapa Flow in 1940. Life aboard the Hood is captured in Cdr Rory O'Conor's "Ten Commandments" of 1933, covering punctuality to gambling. During the first months of the war Hood was sweeping for enemy raiders but tragically in May 1941 she was ordered to chase Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, resulting in the loss of the ship and over 1400 men. The Bismarck was sunk a few days later. Other ships in the volume include Russia's Slava (1903), Australia's Australia (1911), Sweden's Sverige (1915) and Germany's Scharnhorst (1936). Each chapter has its own bibliography, as well as a full history of the ship, technological details and specifications. 440pp, archive photos on most pages, individual and general bibliographies.

Military dogs work tirelessly and relentlessly against the world's deadliest insurgents. Many have been rescue animals, neglected or mistreated by their owners before being trained and loved and given a new lease of life on the front line. In the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the war against terror on home soil, they work day and night to keep our soldiers and civilians safe. Until recently their courage and sacrifice has not been fully appreciated or understood and the book is dedicated to all serving and former dog handlers in the British and coalition forces who have been killed or wounded in action or training. We meet Benji, an ace arms and explosive search dog wearing a soaked rag around his neck to help keep him cool and Benji with the Black Watch enjoying parcels packed with goodies from well-wishers. A soldier carries his four-legged buddy in the desert heat. Regarded as 'unclean' animals by some people in Afghanistan, dogs are often used in organised dog fights. Dogs can get into every nook and cranny to search for bombs and arms caches in crumbling buildings, and when injured they are given life-saving intravenous drips and the best veterinary care. 202pp, colour photos. Paperback.

Stowed away on the top of a train, 20 year Wim Aloserij escapes the obligatory work camps in Nazi-ruled Germany in 1943. The young man from Amsterdam then goes into hiding on a farm, sleeping for months in a wooden chest hidden underground, but it's not to last. In the cover of night Wim is captured during a raid and transported to the infamous Gestapo prison in Amsterdam. There he is thrown into the nightmare of the Holocaust and transported into Camp Amersfoort, the first of three concentration camps he must endure. 'Welcome to paradise' the SS guard had mumbled as he handed Wim a small stack of clothes and a buttoned-up sack of jangling items. He saw they had been stamped with the number 6178. As the victim of an alcoholic and abusive father, he is forced to adapt quicky and urgently to his hellish surroundings. However it is with the end of the war in sight that Wim must draw on every last strength he has when he finds himself caught in the very centre of Allied-Nazi crossfire. In the final days of the war he was bombed while aboard a Nazi prison boat and at the age of 94 finally felt ready to tell his incredible story which he had kept secret for most of his life. 324pp.

Few people nowadays know very much about the Gestapo's 'Black Book' and its implications. Even fewer know of more than a dozen of the famous English names that it included. Anonymous and with no publisher and stamped GEHEIM! (SECRET!), it was compiled in German by the Gestapo and their informants at some time between 1936-7 and July 1940, in readiness for a German invasion of Britain. This is the first serious attempt to identify, classify and analyse a significant sample of the hundreds of anti-Nazi men and women, both British-born and refugee, targeted by the Nazi Secret Police in the Black Book. Deliberately included are those Jewish refugees who, stripped of their German or Austrian citizenship, would become 'naturalised' British and who comprise the majority of those on the List. On the list were Leonhard (sic) and Virginia Woolf. Why did they target a modern novelist? Even those who urged the cessation of the bombing of German civilians and the feeding of starving Germans after the war and supported a new, revived and democratic Germany were included, for example Arthur Ponsonby, Vera Brittain, Bishop Bell, and Victor Gollancz. There is an A-Z listing of some 2,619 names of men and women, mostly with their addresses, to be arrested and interned in camps or placed under house arrest at once, if not executed. Secondly, the more or less A-Z listing of the names and addresses of nearly 400 British Behoerden Firmen and Vereini-Gungen (institutions, businesses, organisations and associations) - all of which were to be proscribed, their papers seized, and their mostly British-born leaders arrested. The second part of the book is the Gestapo's Informationsheft GB, compiled May to July 1940 as an introductory handbook on Britain for the occupation troops, including the SS, and mentioning any additional leading individuals who would require surveillance and probable arrest. The Boy Scouts movement was regarded as a powerful medium of English cultural propaganda and an excellent source for the British Secret Service and was led by Lord Baden-Powell who had himself been a spy in WW1 against Germany. The Fabian Society, Quakers, the New Burlington Gallery, the British Museum and National Gallery, members of the Labour Party, allegedly now in the hands of former public schoolboys, a section on 'Radio' and broadcasting, the Informationsheft describes the Church of England with a membership calculated at 2.3 million as a powerful factor in the exercise of British imperialism, and trade unions said to be 'Marxist' included bakers to cigar makers. It noted that the Freemasons had penetrated all the highest and middle ranks of British society. Sybil Oldfield sheds light on the Gestapo world view and movingly reveals a network of truly exemplary Britons - mavericks, moral visionaries and unsung heroes, chemists, art historians and musicologists, and spies. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? 437pp, 32 photos.

Churchill was in the political wilderness between the two World Wars, increasingly unpopular as he warned against appeasement of Hitler and the relentless militarisation of the Nazi empire. Roosevelt was a good-looking playboy whose wife Eleanor gave valuable support in his career when he became American President in the middle of the Great Depression. In Russia, Stalin was a ruthless operator who stepped into Lenin's shoes after World War I by eliminating his rival Trotsky and murdering millions of peasants who resisted land reforms, not to mention his own former colleagues. The three world leaders had little in common but in an extraordinary throw of the dice they co-operated to defeat Hitler. This highly readable account of the three men, their careers, their policies and their political triumvirate, is a page turning history of the biggest crisis of the 20th century. In June 1941 Hitler had failed to break British morale with the London blitz, and had concluded that the might of the British Navy, with more than a thousand warships and even greater reserves of warplanes, would quickly put paid to any attempted invasion. He therefore turned his attention to the east and in violation of a non-aggression pact with Stalin invaded the Soviet Union. Churchill had repeatedly warned Stalin that the Nazi Panzer divisions moving into Poland could mean only one thing, but Stalin had dismissed both the intelligence and 500 of his own Soviet army generals, leaving him with no option but to join the Allies when disaster struck. He also sent a posse of spies to the west to steal the secrets of nuclear weapons. 1941 saw the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into the war. When the map of Europe was finally carved into three at Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt had no illusions about the fate of the eastern bloc. 464pp, paperback, maps, black and white photos.

Confuse your opponent and evade attacks on your fleet with this new version of the ever-popular Battleships game. Inspired by the shock of Cubism and Vorticism, the Dazzle Ships of the First World War used a striking form of bold camouflage to confuse enemy attackers and this game is based on this unconventional idea - Dazzle Ships. Includes two 64 page map-and-grid books for playing the game and a 16 page booklet explaining the history of the Dazzle Ships. For two players aged six and up, the camouflage markings are in a striking design of teal, green, white, black and grey and blue for the waterline. Laurence King, makers and originators, present the 'Classic nautical contest of the great war - endless amusement for the enthusiastic seafaring boy and girl.' CE safety approved. Ages six to adult, gift boxed.

Sub-titled 'The History of Espionage and the Secret World', Colonel John Hughes-Wilson charts the history of intelligence from its biblical origins to the onset of the surveillance state in the digital age, and lifts the veil of secrecy of this clandestine and murky world. He examines the dangerous uncertainties of spies and human intelligence, how the Cold War became an electronic intelligence war, the technical revolution that began with the first use of reconnaissance photography in WW1, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, how signals intelligence gave America one of its greatest victories, how Wikileaks really happened, and whether 9/11 could have been avoided if America?s post-Cold War intelligence agencies had adapted to the new world of international terrorism. An impressive dossier of little-known informers, renegades and rogues who have caused unknown trouble to their respective governments, the author, one of Britain's leading commentators and contemporary military historians, writes with passion and authority. Chapters also touch on Cambridge's famous five, satellites, Vietnam and the Tet Offensive, Yom Kippur, Barbarossa and Stalin, the USS Pueblo and more. 510pp, paperback with diagrams.

From the Pen & Sword Military Books (Your Towns and Cities in World War Two) series the book does in fact cover the Tower of London which not technically in the City but within Tower Hamlets, and we take a brief look inside its walls and read about the story of the last person to be executed there. The book looks at different areas of the City such as Guildhall, St Paul's Cathedral, St Bartholomew's Hospital, the Blitz and the devastating effect of that eight month period of time between 7th September 1940 and 21st May 1941. The worst raid took place on 29th December 1941 when the German Luftwaffe dropped hundreds of incendiary devices on the historic buildings and homes of the nation's capital. The book also looks at the London Underground and why initially the government refused to allow these train stations to be used as air raid shelters, and the devastating effect a direct hit had on one of them. The City of London was always going to be an obvious target for German bombers and a way to spread fear and panic among the British people. Although not vastly populated, there would still be enough people working there during the day for attacks on it to take their toll. The City's ancient and iconic buildings also bore the brunt of the German bombs including churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire in 1666. Read about the bravery of the staff at St Barts which was one of the medical facilities that remained open during the course of the war, and the sterling work carried out by the City's civilian population and the different voluntary roles including the Home Guard, and the Fire Watchers who spent their nights on the city's rooftops looking out for incendiary devices dropped by the German Luftwaffe. The book covers the regiments of the City of London, memorials and the London Clearing Banks. 170 large page paperback, well illus.

The centre of Britain's codebreaking operation was located at Bletchley Park where a hastily assembled army of codebreakers battled to decipher Germany's secret wartime communications. A motley collection of linguists, mathematicians and crossword enthusiasts pitted their combined wits against the 'unbreakable' naval Enigma codes and Lorenz ciphers used by Hitler and the German High Command. They deciphered high-level signals intelligence disseminated to military commanders was known as Ultra, and had a major influence on the outcome of the war and success in the battle for the Atlantic. British interest in codes and ciphers stretches back to the court of Elizabeth I and her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. The book traces the history of the school established by him in the 1570s to the work of the Secret Office of the Post Office in the 18th century to the creation of the Government Code and Cipher School in 1919. The exploits of the two World Wars form a major aspect of the story and include the achievements of the Admiralty's Room 40 and the infamous Zimmermann Telegram, the contribution made by Alan Turing and his ground-breaking work into computing, and a brief overview of post-war developments and the importance of signals intelligence in the Cold War. 132 page extra large softback, many illus.