20th Century

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred.

Dulcie Bodsworth was the unlikeliest serial killer. She was loved everywhere she went, and the townsfolk of Wilcannia, which she called home in the late 1950s, thought of her as kind and caring....

A number-one New York Times best seller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco....

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction....

Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published....

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20h century....

GCHQ is the largest and most secretive intelligence organisation in the UK, and has existed for 100 years - but we still know next to nothing about it....

Of the three dominant ideologies of the 20th century - fascism, communism, and liberalism - only the last remains....

In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox.

In the darkest moment of history, one child found the courage and strength to survive the unimaginable. This is Henry’s true story....

Blood and Sand is a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony....

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss....

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

Longlisted for the Audiobook Download of the Year, 2007.
How much should you pay for a return trip to the moon? How are Winnie the Pooh and the artificial heart related....

Barbarians at the Gate has been called one of the most influential business books of all time, the definitive account of the largest takeover in Wall Street history....

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Sky Warriors and SBS, comes an epic history about the north african campaign during the second world war.

Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables....

When Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had already become the most admired person in the US and one of the most unlikely celebrities to capture the world’s imagination....

This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator....

This iconoclastic study was one of the most widely debated books of 2000. Finkelstein indicts with vigor and honesty those who exploit the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own personal political and financial gain.

Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz....

On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken....

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union—a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today....

In Israel and the West, it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War or, simply, as "the Setback"....

In early 1943, three Axis defeats changed the course of World War II: at Guadalcanal in the Pacific, Stalingrad in Russia and Tunisia in North Africa. Historians have recognized the significance of the first two campaigns, but not Tunisia which they have either ignored or characterized (as the Americans did at the time) as a sideshow. Yet it ended Axis seapower in the Mediterranean, destroyed more than 2,400 Axis aircraft (40 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s strength), and resulted in the surrender of over 250,000 German and Italian troops, as many as were captured at Stalingrad.

In October 1977, an unknown German police unit made global headlines by storming a hijacked Lufthansa airliner in Mogadishu, Somalia. Operatives of GSG 9 freed eighty-six hostages, eliminated three of the four terrorists, and emerged with a near-total victory. This daring rescue left the world in awe, including the US military. President Carter asked, "Do we have the same capability as the West Germans?" The answer was no—and it was this realization that impelled the creation of Delta Force.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Leon Trotsky, Reinhard Heydrich, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Osama bin Laden, Qasem Soleimani: assassination—the murder of a specific individual by an organized conspiracy in pursuit of political ends—has rarely failed to grip the imagination. In this incisive new history, Simon Ball shows how targeted political murder has become a tool of democratic states but also a key strategy of those who wish to topple them.

Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam's two holiest cities. It is also one of the world's only absolute monarchies. How did Saudi Arabia get to where it is today?

Born in 1943, the author spent his first fourteen years on the move—across Montreal, Canada, three northern states, two southern states, and eight different schools. Each stop brought new friendships, challenges, and a front-row seat to a rapidly changing America in the years after World War II. Told with warmth, wit, and an eye for cultural detail, this memoir is a vivid portrait of boyhood in mid-century North America—complete with dormitories, classrooms, small-town streets, and the quiet moments that shape a life.