Sir Horace Wilson was chief adviser to the PM Neville Chamberlain at the time of the Munich crisis, and the policy of appeasing Hitler is always associated with the names of the two men. Wilson was a civil servant with no official cabinet role, reflecting Chamberlain's preference for seeking the advice of those outside official government decision-making. The chief enemy of appeasement was Winston Churchill, an unpopular figure in the Conservative party. Chamberlain's policy of averting war at all costs is often ascribed to the fact that he was buying time to allow Britain to rearm sufficiently to present a credible military challenge to the might of Germany, but the author's examination of the papers of the period reveals that Chamberlain and Wilson were together seeking to avert war entirely. When Wilson was sent to deliver a personal letter and encountered a shrieking rant from Hitler, he refused to be intimidated and Hitler told Wilson, "England could wish for no better friend than the Führer". At the time of Hitler's Nuremberg rally, as Wilson and Chamberlain agreed to try to avert the coming war by sacrificing the claim of Czechoslovakia to its provinces in the Sudetenland, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, began to realise that appeasement was futile. The abandonment of the Czechs under the Munich agreement created a conflict in the Conservative party which was finally resolved by the invasion of Poland and subsequent war. Wilson lost his job with Chamberlain's demotion and was subsequently unemployable. 448pp, photos.

Dedicated to 'that great family of merry, mean yet magnificent mercenaries, the men of the French Foreign Legion', Edmund Murray was chosen in 1950 to protect Sir Winston Churchill MP, then Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. 'I was to remain with Sir Winston as his constant companion for the next 15 years, accompanying him wherever he went on land, on sea and in the air... I was just outside his bedroom when he died on 24th January 1965, leaving behind an emptiness that will never be filled.' Having written his autobiography in 1987, he decided to give much more detail about his life in the French Foreign Legion to which he signed up at aged just 19 in 1937 armed with little more than schoolboy French and a desire for a life of adventure. Murray travelled through France and on to the Legion's headquarters in Algeria where he completed a gruelling three month basic training programme. He went on to serve in Morocco and Indochina (now Vietnam) where, towards the end of the War, his regiment were forced to retreat from invading Japanese forces into China where his service ended after eight years as a Legionnaire. Throughout WW2, Murray's overwhelming sense of duty compelled him to try to leave the Legion and join the Allied forces, but he was thwarted at every attempt. He was an Englishman in a French organisation, by definition a home for 'the men with no names', where battle lines and countries' boundaries changed almost daily. He was a diplomatic puzzle, but as such his was an extraordinary wartime experience, and this book which borrows from his earlier autobiography and includes rare insights into Legion life from drills and manoeuvres to feast-days and festivals as well as accounts of friendships forged in exceptional circumstances which would last a lifetime. 151pp, colour photos, badges and decorations.

Henry Marten, soldier, member of Parliament, organiser of the trial of Charles I and signatory of the King's Death Warrant, is today a neglected figure of the 17th century. Yet his life was both extraordinary and emblematic. He was at the fulcrum of English history during the turbulent years of the Civil War, the Protectorate and the Restoration. Imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried at the Old Bailey, Marten was found guilty of High Treason, only to be held captive for years on the equivalent of death row. It was while he was in prison that his letters to his mistress Mary Ward were stolen and published in an attempt to destroy his reputation. Witty, clever, loving, sardonic and never despairing, the letters offer a rare and extraordinary insight into the everyday life of a man in the Tower of London awaiting a sentence of death. The attempt to expose him as immoral revealed him instead as a tender and brave man. In this revelatory biography, he emerges as a clever, lively-minded man, free of the fundamentalist zeal so common in many of his republican contemporaries. Marten never abandoned his beliefs in equality, in a representative Parliament under a Constitution (which he had helped to write) without a monarch or a House of Lords, and in that way can be seen as a very modern man. 'A deeply researched and convincing portrait of the later years of one of the most remarkable radical politicians in British history.' - Ronald Hutton. It also reminds us that not all regicides were soldier puritans, and that some men believed in a republic before the Civil War started. Illustrated, 214pp.

A beautifully told award winning biography, the first full study for over 30 years which incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal more about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She famously wrote 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways', shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure. Born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, Elizabeth achieved lasting literary fame and remains Britain's greatest woman poet whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Here is the woman as a literary giant and high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage, and a writer who defied chronic illness and long term disability to change the course of cultural history. The book holds up a mirror to the woman, her work and the art of biography in itself and a life that remains an electrifying study in self invention. Sampson makes a convincing claim that EBB was the first female lyric poet and her point is that Aurora Leigh provides us with a model for understanding how EBB forged a new relationship between female subjectivity and public utterance. 322pp, paperback, colour illus.

Brilliantly contrasting the Old World of wartime France with the hopeful New World epitomised by Christian Dior's New Look, the book revolves around his younger sister Catherine Dior, a Resistance heroine. Picardie explores the relationship between the visionary designer and his beloved sister who inspired his most famous perfume and shaped his vision of femininity. Picardie's journey takes her to wartime Paris, where Christian honed his couture skills while Catherine dedicated herself to the French Resistance and the battle against the Nazis, until she was captured by the Gestapo and deported to the German concentration camp of Ravensbrück. Catherine's story shines - the quiet Dior who preferred flowers to fashion, the unsung heroine who survived the abuse of the Third Reich to help liberate France. The final section of the book covers in depth the British royal family including a wonderful full page colour photograph of Princess Margaret wearing her Dior gown for her 21st birthday portrait in 1951, photographed by Cecil Beaton. Packed with archive and colour photographs, fashion shoots, illustrations, dress designs, the salon of the Worth Couture House Paris 1910 and even a doll with a shaved head made by a prisoner at Ravensbrück, contrasting the exhaustion, starvation and torment by thirst and abusive guards and snarling dogs with fashion and wealth. 438pp in large softback 17.4 x 23.5cm beautifully designed and extremely well illustrated throughout in both colour and black and white.

Ten years since the death of the world renowned and controversial intellectual, this stylish edition is one of 12 commemorating Christopher Hitchens' most wry and provocative works. Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defence of man's inalienable rights. It has been celebrated, criticised, maligned, suppressed and co-opted, and forms the philosophical cornerstone of the first democratic republic whose revolution is the only example that still speaks to us - the United States of America. Hitchens marvels at the book's forethought and revels in its contentiousness and this brilliant portrait is an attractive introduction to Paine's life and work as a whole. 158pp, paperback.

Sub-titled 'The Story of a Tangled Inheritance', what would you do if you found out that your ancestors were slave owners? Richard Atkinson was in his late 30s and approaching a milestone he had long dreaded, the age at which his father died, when one day he came across a box of old family letters gathering dust on top of a cupboard. This discovery set him on an all-consuming, highly emotional journey, ultimately taking him from the weather-beaten house of his Cumbrian ancestors to the abandoned ruins of their sugar estate in Jamaica. His search has led him to one forebear in particular, an earlier Richard Atkinson, a West India merchant who had shipped all the British army's supplies during the American War of Independence, and amassed staggering wealth and connections along the way. 'Rum' Atkinson died young, at the height of his powers, leaving a vast inheritance to his many nephews and nieces, as well as the society beauty who had refused his proposal of marriage. Described as 'a real page-turner, the subject matter is Georgian-era merchants, early merchant banks, the American War of Independence, slavery, trade, war with France, sugar and abolition', and defying classification, this is part political thriller and definitely a history of what could be described as a British Alexander Hamilton figure. 502pp including historical line art and colour photos and other images.

A Roaring Girl was loud when she should be quiet, disruptive when she should be submissive, sexual when she should be pure, 'masculine' when she should be 'feminine'. Meet the unsung heroines of British history who refused to play by the rules. Bold and inspiring, Holly Kyte has selected the game changing life stories of eight formidable women whose grit, determination whose grit, determination and radical unconventionality saw them defy the odds to forge their own paths. From the notorious cross-dressing thief Mary Frith in the 17th century, rebel slave Mary Prince, Caroline Norton who fought her repulsive husband, adventurer, industrialist and LGBT trailblazer Anne Lister aka Gentleman Jack in the 19th century, Mad Madge Margaret Cavendish, old maid Mary Astell, cavalier Charlotte Charke, the Amazon Hannah Snell. 462pp, well illustrated paperback.

One of the most beautiful and brilliant women of her time, Gladys Deacon dazzled and puzzled the glittering social circles in which she moved. Born in Paris to American parents in 1881, she emerged from a traumatic childhood - her father having shot her mother's lover dead when Gladys was only 11 - to captivate and inspire some of the greatest literary and artistic names of the Belle Epoque. Marcel Proust wrote of her, 'I never saw a girl with such beauty, such magnificent intelligence, such goodness and charm.' Berenson considered marrying her, Rodin and Monet befriended her, Boldini painted her, and Epstein sculpted her. She inspired love from diverse dukes and princes and the interest of women such as Gertrude Stein. In 1921 when Gladys was 40, she achieved the wish she had held since the age of 14 to marry the 9th Duke of Marlborough, then freshly divorced from his fellow American Consuelo Vanderbilt. Gladys's circle now included Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lytton Strachey and Winston Churchill who described her as 'a strange, glittering being'. But life at Blenheim was not a success. When the Duke evicted her in 1933, the only remaining signs of Gladys were two sphinxes bearing her features on the west terraces and mysterious blue eyes in the grand portico. She became a recluse, and the wax injection she had to straighten her nose when she was 22 had by now ravaged her beauty. Gladys was to spend her last years in the psych-geriatric ward of a mental hospital, where she was discovered by a young Hugo Vickers. Intrigued and compelled to unmask the truth of her mysterious life, he visited her over the course of two years and eventually published this marvellous biography, his first book, in 1979, two years after Gladys's death. 40 years on, he has now completely rewritten and revised his original biography, updating it with previously unavailable material. We enter the heady world of the upper classes at a time of great social, artistic and political change. 388pp, paperback with photos.

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.