Showing results by publisher "--Tyson Hanks" in Modern

Sunset, 8 June 1982, East Falkland. Eight specially trained Royal Marines infiltrate Goat Ridge, a long rocky hilltop between Mount Harriet and Two Sisters which are occupied by a battalion of 600 Argentine infantry. Their daring mission was to hide out in hostile territory, reconnoiter the Argentine position and then report back. From their hiding place just metres away from the enemy, they note and sketch the Argentine positions, then withdraw as stealthily as they had come.

Anne Frank, it has been said, gave a face and a name to the horror of the Holocaust. This is her story. It relates how Anne, her family, and their friends hid in secret rooms - "the Annex" - in an Amsterdam warehouse for 25 months. Anne, just 13 when the family moved in and only 15 when the Gestapo at last broke down the doors of her secret world, found hope where there was only fear and the first blush of love when outside and all around there washed a sea of hate.

Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis' codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence workers were then involved in making crucial information available to the Allied leaders and commanders who desperately needed it.

Korea: War Without End examines the stand-off between East and West in Korea that ultimately defined the second half of the 20th century. It provides a critical analysis of the lack of preparation by the West for war; the results of the North Korean invasion in June 1950; the counter-stroke by MacArthur in September and then the strategic overreach which led to communist China’s involvement on the North Korean side, and the rapid escalation to consideration of the use of nuclear weapons.

In Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu S. Pillai takes us through these remarkable dynamics. With an arresting cast of characters―maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen―this book is ambitious in its scope and provocative in its position.

Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors - including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave - Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller and offers a gripping day-by-day account of what really happened behind the scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, Ukip and Britain Stronger in Europe.

The year was 1935: the twilight of the English aristocracy. It was a time of wealth and glamour; of lavish balls and evening gowns; of tiaras and a coronation. As personal maid to Lady Coventry, Hilda Newman had a unique insight into the leisured life of one of Britain's most noble families. In her fascinating memoir of life upstairs and down, Hilda takes us back to this period between the wars; a gilded era which would soon be dramatically changed by the Second World War.

By June 1942, Britain had reached her lowest ebb. Her military command was in tatters, her armies beaten, and in the Middle East it seemed all might be lost. Her new ally, America, had only fledgling armed forces and was severely under-trained, yet it was this alliance of the weary combatant and naïve newcomer, coming together for the first time in North Africa, that would eventually bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany.

This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with a prematurely aged Chips descending into poor health but still socially active and able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles.

Frank Blaichman was 16 years old when the war broke out. In 1942, the killings began in Poland. With his family and friends decimated by the roundups, Blaichman decided that he would rather die fighting; he set off for the forest to find the underground bunkers of Jews who had already escaped. Together they formed a partisan force dedicated to fighting the Germans. This is a harrowing, utterly moving memoir of a young Polish Jew who chose not to go quietly and defied the mighty German war machine during World War II.

In the early morning of 9 April 1940 a fleet of German ships entered the Oslofjord. The Norwegian artillery delayed the German advance long enough for King Haakon VII and his cabinet to escape to England, but there was no stopping the Nazi blitzkrieg. Norway stood on the cusp of a traumatic five-year occupation whose aftershocks would continue to trouble its national consciousness long after the defeated Germans departed in May 1945. In a magnificent feat of storytelling, Robert Ferguson tells the extraordinary – and relatively little-known – story of the occupation and its judicial aftermath.

'The Singularity' is what Silicon Valley calls the idea that, eventually, we will be overrun by machines that are able to take decisions and act for themselves. What no one says is that it happened before. A few hundred years ago, humans started building the robots that now rule our world. They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, and which, unlike us, need never die. The Handover distils over three hundred years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.

Hence this is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up the Nobel Prize, the Beatles become, if anything, bigger than the Beatles and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks to the march of technology, be playing Las Vegas forever.

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.

1757 - Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious publication detailing the names and 'specialties' of the capital's prostitutes, eventually became one of the 18th century's most successful literary works as well as an essential accessory for any serious gentleman of pleasure. Beyond its titillating passages lay a glimpse into the sex lives of those who lived and died by the list's profits during the Georgian era. The Covent Garden Ladies tells the story of three unusual characters whose colourful lives were brought together by this publication.

It was the era of Hawke and Keating, Kylie and INXS, the America's Cup and the Bicentenary. It was perhaps the most controversial decade in Australian history, with high-flying entrepreneurs booming and busting, torrid debates over land rights and immigration, the advent of AIDS, a harsh recession and the rise of the New Right. It was a time when Australians fought for social change - on union picket lines, at rallies for women's rights and against nuclear weapons....

Prit Buttar retraces the ebb and flow of the various battles and campaigns fought throughout the Ukraine and Romania in 1944. January and February saw Army Group South encircled in the Korsun Pocket. Although many of the encircled troops did escape, in part due to Soviet intelligence and command failures, the Red Army would endeavour to not make the same mistakes again. Indeed, in the coming months the Red Army would demonstrate an ability to learn and improve, reinventing itself as a war-winning machine, demonstrated clearly in its success in the Iasi-Kishinev operation.

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss. Under Edward Heath, the optimism of the Sixties had become a distant memory. Now the headlines were dominated by strikes and blackouts, unemployment and inflation. As the world looked on in horrified fascination, Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart. And yet, amid the gloom, glittered a creativity and cultural dynamism that would influence our lives long after the nightmarish Seventies had been forgotten.

The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a jobbing critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance to teach schoolchildren in a provincial Austrian village, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and aligns his fortunes with the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture at the back of a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold over the next decade.

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. The suitcases contained all manner of paraphernalia: medals, gems, two cigar cutters, silk underwear, a hot water bottle, and the equivalent of 1 million in cash. Hidden in a coffee can, a set of brass vials housed glass capsules containing a clear liquid and a white precipitate: potassium cyanide.