Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Modern

Gripping and unforgettable, Chernobyl Roulette sounds the alarm about the dangers of nuclear sites in an unprecedented time, when plant workers are left to fight on their own while the world holds its breath. In a book that feels like a thriller, Serhii Plokhy tells a remarkable story about human nature, uncertainty and courage.

On the day that Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. Despite all the efforts of the Allied armies, Hitler's powerful Panzer divisions smashed their way through to the French coast. For the retreating British Expeditionary Force, Dunkirk was the only practical point of departure, and on May 26, the order for total evacuation, Operation Dynamo, was given.

‘I try to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to make it real…’ Over a lifetime spent at the frontline of solidarity and resistance, Arundhati Roy’s words have lit a clear way through the darkness that surrounds us. Combining the skills of the architect she trained to be and the writer she became, she illuminates the hidden structures of modern empire like no one else, revealing their workings so that we can resist.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of George VI: The Dutiful King by Philip Ziegler, read by Charlie Anson. If Ethelred was notoriously 'Unready' and Alfred 'Great', King George VI should bear the designation of 'George the Dutiful'. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he thought he ought to be doing rather than what he wanted to do. Inarticulate and loathing any sort of public appearances, he accepted that it was his destiny to figure regularly and conspicuously in the public eye, gritted his teeth, largely conquered his crippling stammer and got on with it.

Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe were philosophy students at Oxford during the Second World War when most male undergraduates (and many tutors) were conscripted. Taught by refugee scholars, women and conscientious objectors, the four friends developed a philosophy that could respond to the war's darkest revelations.

Dawn. 19th July 1972. A force of nearly 300 heavily armed, well-trained guerrillas launches a surprise attack on the small fishing village of Mirbat. All that stands in their way is a troop of just nine SAS, aided only by an elite band of fighter pilots overhead. Two years earlier, a Communist rebellion had threatened the Arabian Peninsula, in the strategically critical Sultanate of Oman. Following a covert intelligence mission, 22 SAS deployed their largest ever assault force against the rebels. But this was to be a bitter and hard-fought campaign culminating the Battle of Mirbat.

In 1939 off the New England coast, the submarine USS Squalus accidentally sinks to the bottom of the sea during a training exercise, killing half her crew. Coming to the rescue is the USS Sculpin, in many ways the Squalus’s twin. As their oxygen supply dwindles, the remaining crew aboard the Squalus are saved in a time-consuming, white-knuckle operation. Eventually the sunken submarine is raised, repaired, and returned to duty, with a new name: the Sailfish.

Count Moïse de Camondo lived a few doors away from Edmund de Waal's forebears, the Ephrussi, first encountered in his best-selling memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. Like the Ephrussi, the Camondos were part of Belle Epoque high society. They were also targets of anti-Semitism. Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with the greatest private collection of French 18th-century art for his son to inherit. But when Nissim was killed in the First World War, it became a memorial and, on the Count's death, was bequeathed to France.

Before Edward Snowden's infamous data breach, the largest theft of government secrets was committed by an ingenious traitor whose intricate espionage scheme and complex system of coded messages were made even more baffling by his dyslexia. His name is Brian Regan, but he came to be known as the Spy Who Couldn't Spell.

Penguin Audio presents Has the West Lost It? by Kishore Mahbubani, read by Jonathan Keeble. The West's centuries-old status as the centre of global wealth and power is coming to an end. As the new powers - China and India from Asia and others from Africa and Latin America - rise to the top of the world's pecking order, how should the West react?

Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have grappled with a series of familiar problems - but often their ideas are hard to digest, before we even try to apply them to today's issues. Linda Yueh is renowned for her combination of erudition, as an accomplished economist herself, and accessibility, as a leading writer and broadcaster in this field.

Growing up in the Polish village of Tarnogrod on the fringes of a deep pine forest gives Mala the happiest childhood she could have hoped for. But, as the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto and her family and friends are reduced to starvation. She takes matters into her own hands and bravely removes her yellow star, risking sneaking out to the surrounding villages to barter for food.

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.

History has it that the role of women in Nazi Germany was to be the perfect Hausfrau, produce the next Aryan generation, and be a loyal cheerleader for the Führer. Then they became the Trümmerfrauen, or Rubble Women, as they cleared and tidied their ruined country to get it back on its feet. They were Germany’s heroines. The few women tried and convicted after the war were simply the evil aberrations - the camp guards, the female Nazi elite - that proved this rule. However, Wendy Lower’s research into the very ordinary women who went out to the Nazi Eastern Front reveals an altogether different story.

In 1998, Helga Schneider, in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna in which her 90-year-old mother lived. The last time she had seen her mother was 27 years earlier, when her mother asked her daughter to try on the SS uniform which she treasures, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider rejected.

Little Lien wasn't taken from her Jewish parents - she was given away in the hope that she might be saved. Hidden and raised by a foster family in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, she survived the war only to find that her real parents had not. Much later, she fell out with her foster family, and Bart van Es - the grandson of Lien's foster parents - knew he needed to find out why. His account of tracing Lien and telling her story is a searing exploration of two lives and two families.

Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Here, Dita writes with startling clarity on the horrors and joys of a life delayed by the Holocaust. From her earliest memories and childhood friendships in Prague before the war, to the Nazi occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at Terezín, to the unimaginable fear and bravery of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and life after liberation.

Spring 1958: a mysterious individual believed to be high up in the Polish secret service began passing Soviet secrets to the West. His name was Michal Goleniewski, and he remains one of the most important yet least known and most misunderstood spies of the Cold War. Even his death is shrouded in mystery and he has been written out of the history of Cold War espionage - until now.

1st May 1945. The world did not know it yet, but the final week of the Third Reich's existence had begun. Hitler was dead, but the war had still not ended. Everything had both ground to a halt and yet remained agonizingly uncertain. Volker Ullrich's remarkable book takes the listener into a world torn between hope and terror, violence and peace.

Fragile Cargo will share the as-yet-untold story of the brave people who saved China's art from the ravages of the Second World War, undertaking a perilous journey across the vast country in order to protect these fragile treasures. After the end of the war, and the beginning of the Communist regime, the Forbidden City curators were each faced with a stark choice: remain with their rescued artefacts in China, or flee with them to Taiwan. Depending on their choice, the curators' fates took startlingly different, sometimes heart-breaking turns.