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The battle zone on and behind Sword witnessed on 6 June some of the most dramatic and tumultuous scenes, the greatest human stories, of the entire war in the West embracing 30,000 paratroopers, infantry, commandos and of course aircrew and sailors – not to mention the German and French participants. Although the core facts of Sword Beach are familiar, Max Hastings will explore new angles and fresh personalities in this new history of what was perhaps the supreme military achievement of the Western war.

Award-winning journalist and author Andrew Rule distils the daring, the desperation and danger of the track into a bravura account of some of Australian racing's most famous and infamous moments, its celebrations and its secrets, the grittiness of the gambling life behind the glitz and glamour. With an ear for the colloquial, the humorous and the absurd, and an eye for physical bravery and financial folly, Rule shows how racing still defines part of the Australian character.

Europe is an astonishingly successful place. In this dazzling new history, best-selling author Simon Jenkins grippingly tells the story of its evolution from warring peoples to peace, wealth and freedom - a story that twists and turns from Greece and Rome, through the Dark Ages, the Reformation and the French Revolution, to the Second World War and up to the present day. Jenkins takes in leaders from Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc to Wellington and Angela Merkel as well as cultural figures from Aristotle to Shakespeare and Picasso.

The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war. Drawing on 3,000 years of military history, Victor Davis Hanson argues that despite its novel industrial barbarity, neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual. Nor was its ultimate outcome surprising. The Axis powers were well prepared to win limited border conflicts, but once they blundered into global war, they had no hope of victory.

Eleven months after his liberation from Auschwitz, Viktor E. Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna. The psychologist, who was to become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great adversity. Published for the very first time, Frankl’s words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. He offers an insightful exploration of the maxim ‘live as if you were living for the second time’ and unfolds his basic conviction that every crisis also includes an opportunity.

In one furious week of fighting in December 1943, the First Canadian Infantry Division took Ortona, Italy, from elite German paratroopers ordered to hold the medieval port at all costs. When the battle was over, the Canadians emerged victorious despite heavy losses.

Three days after Russian tanks roll into Ukraine, President Volodymr Zelensky issues a desperate appeal for foreign military volunteers to help defend his country. Thousands answer the call from all over the world: some of them experienced soldiers, others novices who’ve never held a gun before. Among their ranks are high-minded idealists, adventure-seekers bored with civilian life, and ex-criminals seeking redemption – all risking their lives against the world's most vicious superpower.

In the 20th century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. History can familiarise, and it can warn.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most widely-reported on regions in the world—yet misinformation about its history and its people abound. In this vital book, historian Anne Irfan explains Gaza’s outsized political significance through six pivotal moments in its modern history, beginning with...

In this gripping memoir by the chief American interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, Richard Sonnenfeldt recounts a remarkable life. By age 22 he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, when he was appointed chief interpreter for the American prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

During his service, he spent pretrial time with Hermann Göering as well as other top Nazi leaders.

In this last book of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer recounts his return to Berlin after the Third Reich’s defeat. Having fled Berlin and imminent arrest by the Gestapo in 1940, Shirer returned to Europe in October 1945 to verify the facts of the Fuhrer’s death, thus bringing to a close - or so he thought - his involvement with the Third Reich. He describes his return to his homeland and his ensuing careers as a broadcast journalist and author. He describes the McCarthy years and how the blacklist affected his own network, CBS.

The nature of war is constant change. We live in an era of exponential technological acceleration which is transforming how wars are waged. Today, the battlespace is transparent; multi-domain sensors can see anything, and long-range precision fire can target everything that is observed. Autonomous weapons can be unleashed into the battlespace and attack any target from above, hitting the weakest point of tanks and armored vehicles. The velocity of war is hyper-fast.

On 12th April 1981 a revolutionary new spacecraft blasted off from Florida on her maiden flight. NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia was the most advanced flying machine ever built - the high watermark of post-war aviation development. A direct descendant of the record-breaking X-planes the likes of which Chuck Yeager had tested in the skies over the Mojave Desert, Columbia was a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, capable of flying to space and back before being made ready to fly again.

Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other–in fact had never met–each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives. In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning clothes historian Lucy Adlington documents their stories, knitting together the experiences that fragmented their families and their lives.

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century.

The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose personalities had somehow given them the ability to do whatever they wished. Ian Kershaw's new book is a compelling, lucid and challenging attempt to understand these rulers.

Published in 1937, the result of 15 years of careful study since his days on the German General Staff in the First World War, Achtung Panzer! argues how vital the proper use of tanks and supporting armoured vehicles would be in the conduct of a future war. When that war came, just two years later, he proved it, leading his Panzers with distinction in the Polish, French and Russian campaigns. Panzer warfare had come of age, exactly as he had forecast.

Hastings has been a life-long student of warfare, a ‘chronicler of conflict’, working first as a foreign correspondent on battlefields, then as a prolific prize-winning historian of the 20th century’s greatest struggles. He has now been studying warfare for over fifty years, published thirty books, and given hundreds of talks and lectures. Here are thirteen of the best. Addressing questions of truth versus myth and revisiting many last-generation narratives, Hastings leads us through the most important conflicts in recent times.

It's summer 1962, and Joachim Rudolph, a student, is digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. Waiting on the other side in East Berlin - dozens of men, women and children, all willing to risk everything to escape. From the award-winning creator of the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 podcast, Tunnel 29 is the true story of the most remarkable escape tunnel dug under the Berlin Wall. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with the survivors and thousands of pages of Stasi documents, Helena Merriman brilliantly reveals the stranger-than-fiction story.

Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos Eire explores how a culture increasingly devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals.