In 1939, ever increasing numbers of budding cryptanalysts started reporting for wartime duty at a country house in north Buckinghamshire. Musicians, society debutants and novelists were among the women and tweedy, owlish young men, their heads filled with astounding equations and barely comprehensible calculations. The 10,000 men and women who worked at Bletchley Park had to sign the Official Secrets Act and they kept their vow of silence implacably for decades afterwards. Some died without the satisfaction of even their own families knowing about their crucial work breaking the German and Japanese codes. Belatedly however the secret was lifted, and now Sinclair McKay chooses a hundred of Bletchley Park's alumni to tell the stories of their whole lives, and not just the wartime interlude. Sometimes the distinction as chess players, musicians or linguists was what saw these young people selected. For others the intense intellectual crucible seems to have galvanised their ambition and widened their horizons, and sent them out into the post-war world determined to make a difference with their lives. Here then are the historians and archaeologists, novelists and naturalists, but also classics masters, a Nuremberg prosecutor and an associate of Andy Warhol - everyone from Roy Jenkins to the man who wrote the music for the Dracula films, and from the woman who saved St Pancras Station to Prince Philip's first girlfriend, and even those unfairly judged during their lives not to have amounted to much at all. 250pp, eight pages of photos.

Packaged for WH Smith, the DVD entitled Churchill: A Giant In the Century is a fascinating film using rare footage and recordings from the archives. It has been fully digitally remastered and colourised using the latest techniques available and shows Churchill's life for the first time in colour. He was a figure who bestrode the 20th century who held many political and cabinet positions including Home Secretary from 1910, and then Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for War. However it was on 10th May 1940 when Churchill became Prime Minister and took control of Britain's war effort that he finally sealed his place in history. A soldier, an artist, historian and the only British Prime Minister to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sir Winston Churchill was also an Honorary Citizen of the United States. DVD and large softback fully illustrated booklet. 50 minutes running time.

Sub-titled 'The Great War: A Century of Remembrance' this is the story of World War One told in a pictorial magazine format covering the historic setting from Sarajevo and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire onwards. Explains how aircraft tanks and other technology were developed for use in war and tells the story of each major battle from Mons through to Verdun and the Somme. The DVD is a silent film shot on The Somme which surrenders its secrets and reveals what happened on that fateful day. Running time approximately 50 minutes. Magazine and DVD box set.

Celebrating and commemorating 100 years of the RAF and with access to rare archives, Mike Lepine uses photographs and documents to bring the story of the people, aeroplanes and missions to life as never before. The box set includes the DVD Air Aces, a groundbreaking series that tells the story of the most heroic airborne combat missions in history. Using real vintage aircraft, the series films the impossible by recreating mid-air combat scenes and features Spitfires and Lancaster Bombers. The magazine looks at the men, women and aircraft at the heart of this great service. Fully illustrated with archive and colour photos and fact boxes for every aviation enthusiast. DVD running time 50 minutes. Magazine and DVD box set.

How did 13 isolated colonies who in 1775 began a war with Britain without a navy or an army win their independence from the greatest naval and military power on earth? The American Revolution was a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than 21 navies fighting on five oceans to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea, and of course off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theatres. Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American Independence from a naval perspective and also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. He offers valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian history and the result is a more profound understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, the path to American Independence and the rise and fall of the British Empire. Using original logs, reports, diaries and archaeological discoveries it is the gripping tale of the birth of the New World. Colour plates, 572 page paperback.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the British Battle Fleet comprised ships that were only marginally different from those that had won the Battle of Trafalgar a generation earlier. By the end of her reign in 1901 their successors would have been unrecognisable to Nelson's sailors. Gone were the towering sail plans, the 'wooden walls' and large numbers of relatively small muzzle-loading guns, to be replaced by black-painted steel hulls, driven independent of the winds by steam machinery, protected with sophisticated armour, and mounting a very few large breech-loading guns firing explosive shells. The only thing unchanged was the Royal Navy's dominance of the world's oceans, seized at Trafalgar and never relinquished. How the Naval Administration coped with this unprecedented revolution in technology without losing maritime ascendancy is the theme of this latest book by Norman Friedman. He analyses the broader factors of politics, economics and international rivalry that bore down on the decision-making and explains how these influences worked through into the ships that were actually built. The result is a much deeper and more sympathetic understanding of the 19th-century Royal Navy and its warship designs. It is a well-illustrated and comprehensive gallery of photographs with in-depth captions accompanied by specially commissioned plans of the important classes by A. D. Baker, and a colour section featuring the original Admiralty draughts, including a spectacular double gatefold. 400 huge pages, 25 x 29.5cm.
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In searing detail and immediacy, all the violence, grief, pathos, black humour and courage of conflict emerges in this collection of first-person accounts. Reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings's lifetime of studying war, his book rings the changes through the centuries. Nearly 350 stories illustrate what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome's captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon's marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, to a Vietnamese woman holding her child during conflict and SAS troops storming the Iranian Embassy. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Proust and Waugh, Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female 'abosi' fighters of Dahomey, and heroic ambulance drivers of World War One, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: although nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy. We enter now the 21st century which some are already calling 'the Post-Heroic Age'. 517 magnificent pages with a gallery of photographs in black and white and colour.

'The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America' is the sub-title of this original combination of cutting edge scholarship and vivid prose. Few individuals, European or Native American, had as much impact on early America as the Pamunkey leader Opechancanough. Generally he plays a brief part as a violent and tragic figure but in contrast renowned historian of early Virginia James Horn reconstructs a remarkable life story that spanned a century at a time when America was digging more deeply into its origins. This eye-opening narrative challenges well-worn tales of Pocahontas and congenial first encounters with a grim record of kidnapping, starvation and total war. In the mid-16th century, Spanish explorers in the Chesapeake Bay kidnapped an Indian youth, took him back to Spain, and subsequently Mexico. During this time abroad, the boy lived in Madrid, Seville, Havana and Mexico City, becoming a favourite of King Philip II and converting to Catholicism. Eventually after nearly a decade he returned to Virginia with a group of Jesuits to help establish a mission. Shortly after arriving however, he abandoned his fellow missionaries, rejoined his family, and soon organised a war party that killed the Spaniards. In the years that followed, Opechancanough, as the English called him, helped establish the most powerful chiefdom in the mid-Atlantic region. When English settlers founded Virginia in 1607 he fought tirelessly to drive them away, leading to a series of wars that spanned the next 40 years, the first Anglo-Indian wars in America, and came close to destroying the colony. But the English settlers proved more resilient than the Spanish missionaries had been 40 years earlier. Additional soldiers, weapons and provisions arrived from England, forcing Opechancanough to continue his offensive for decades. He survived to be nearly 100 years old and died as he lived, fighting the invaders. 296pp, maps and woodcut illustrations.

Blending biography and history this is a highly readable account of Winston Churchill's adventures as a young war correspondent from the jungles of Cuba and the mountains of the North-West Frontier to the banks of the Nile and the plains of South Africa. Enthralled by combat, cigars and whisky, young Winston showed extraordinary courage and tenacity under fire. He was the brazen foreign correspondent covering wars of empire in Cuba, India, the Sudan, and South Africa and in those far-flung corners of the world he reported from the front lines between 1895 and 1900. He mastered his celebrated command of language and formed strong opinions about war. He thought little of his own personal safety, so convinced was he of his destiny, jumping at any chance to be where bullets flew and canons roared. Based on his private letters and war reportage, the book intertwines young Winston's daring exploits in combat, adventures, and rise as a major literary talent, experiences that shaped the world leader he was to become. The huge public interest generated by his South African activities, his capture and subsequent escape provided the final boost Churchill needed to edge his way as a Conservative into the formerly Liberal parliamentary seat of Oldham. 309 exciting pages, photos.

World War II was global warfare on an unimaginable scale, generating suffering, deprivation and death of almost limitless dimensions. Not even the Great War saw such barbaric cruelty and atrocity. 100 million men, and a smaller number of women, entered the theatre of war fighting with weapons that had been honed in the earlier conflict, while bombing, deportation, requisitioning and theft completely overturned domestic structure and infrastructure. Coercion, torture and genocide were carried out by regular servicemen and women and the police. The author goes beyond the view of war that sees Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military as causes of crisis, and looks at the broader historical forces that prompted the Axis states to undertake imperial territorial conquest. The conflict goes back to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and continued a decade after "Victory in Europe" in 1945, with its course being influenced by the civil wars raging in China, Ukraine, Italy and Greece. The author is a major authority on World War II and his argument in this magisterial book is that the long Second World War was the last imperial war. Imperial crises frame the origins and course of the conflict and the outcome ended half a millennium of colonialism. The books starts with the fracturing of trade and finance in the 1920s combined with growing nationalist ideology, particularly in Germany where Hitler blamed the Jews for frustrating his ambitions. The hostility of both the US and Soviet Union, on opposite sides, to the survival of traditional colonial empires was key to the eventual outcome. The progress of the war provides the author with a frame for thematic chapters exploring the wider experience of the conflict. How did states mobilise the colossal manpower and material resources? How did states, parties and individuals justify extreme barbarity? What did the war do emotionally and psychologically to those sucked into it? Along the way the author examines issues such as the role of the BBC and intelligence services, and the contribution of partisans and resistance fighters, particularly in the Pacific where barbarity was extreme. Almost a third of the female partisans in Italy were wounded or killed. A huge 990pp, illus.