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, George S. Patton, Sir John Moore at Corunna, Michael Strachan's vignette of Colonel J. Enoch Powell in 1943 in North Africa and Rory Stewart's 2004 experience of Iraq may come fresh. Max Hastings has drawn upon writers and narratives that have stirred his imagination over a lifetime. Modern scholars scorn for instance C. V. Wedgwood's writings on the English Civil Wars, those of Cecil Woodham-Smith about the Crimea, and Barbara Tuchman's Big Books. All were brilliant narrative historians who have been his faithful companions for 60 years. Likewise he has included several of Elizabeth Longford's vignettes of Wellington. Her account of the June 1815 Duchess of Richmond's ball before Waterloo, that glittering 'revelry by night' is 'more vivid than that of any other writer I know, save Byron and Thackeray.' Dr Johnson quoted a French savant who noted that 'There are many puerilities in war'. Most of those who fight are young, and thus the spirit of armies is distilled from a mingling of soldiers' physical vigour and intellectual immaturity with their licences to kill and opportunities to die. Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales which rings the changes through the centuries. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it was like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female 'abosi' fighters of Dahomey, and heroic ambulance drivers of WW1. Max Hastings also shows compassion for the victims, above all civilians. 517pp, 16 pages of colour and other illus.

Bibliophile has deliberately chosen two British aircraft striking aviation paintings from this series (rather than the German airplanes) in this collectable Keith Burns Collection. It depicts RAF Beaufighters in the North Sea, 1945, two airplanes swooping down to sea level over a rough sea with waves crashing against the evacuation boat packed with German sailors escaping their sunken ship, with other destroyers in the background of this exciting battle scene. Keith Burns is an award-winning aviation artist and commercial illustrator and in 2012 joined the Guild of Aviation Artists winning an award in 2015 for the Best Acrylic Painting in Show. He had his first solo exhibition at the RAF Club in London and won Aviation Painting of the Year in 2016. 1000 piece acrylic jigsaw arrives in a presentation sturdy box measuring 40 x 27 x 6.4cm. Finished puzzle size is 97 x 34cm. Grey blue colour scheme and a companion to 91651 Lancaster in the same series.

Wargaming with a difference, designed for 2-4 players aged 12 to adult, the game will take approximately 45 minutes on a board which when opened measures 25.5cm square. The game takes players to the very heart of what it would have been like to be a Commanding Officer in the trenches of Flanders. At every move you must make decisions that will determine the fate of the men you command. Your troops must face bombardment from the enemy's artillery, tanks and airplanes. How many men will you risk on a particular course of action? A game of strategy, the 54 playing cards are tastefully designed in colour featuring barbed wire, machine guns, infantry, Flying Circus, tanks, zeppelin balloons etc. 40 troop pieces, eight player pieces in primary colours, three dice and one Rules set. Box measures 25.5cm square.

Written on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the book brings to life the pilots and planes involved through the stories of 18 airmen, nine from each side, and 18 different aircraft. The authors have chosen pilots from seven nations: Germans, Britons, two New Zealanders, two Swiss, one Canadian, one Pole and an Italian. Many of the featured pilots are not well known, several died in action and others spent years in captivity. A few suffered terrible wounds, while many survived remarkably unscathed, physically at least. What all these men had in common was a love of flying and a willingness to take risks that are unimaginable for those who enjoy the comfort and safety of commercial jet travel. The variety of aircraft includes the four-engine Focker-Wulf Condor and the Fiat CR42 Biplane Fighter on the Axis side, and the Boulton Paul Defiant fighter with its rear turret and the Walrus Seaplane on the Allied side. The superstars Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf109 represented considerable achievements in engineering, design and manufacturer. One or two like the Defiant and the Stuka were 'found out' in the testing cauldron of the Battle of Britain. Relatively few lives were lost on each side - 3,149 all told - yet casualty figures and the strategic significance of the Battle of Britain should not be confused. The Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, a key ally of Churchill's, transformed aircraft production in Britain, and made sure that Dowding and Park the RAF Air Chief Marshalls had the Spitfires and Hurricanes they needed to see their plan through. We meet the New Zealander who 'borrowed' a seaplane from the Royal Navy to set up a freelance air-sea rescue service that saved the lives of dozens of British and German pilots; the Swiss baron who claimed to have destroyed six British fighters in a day; the vainglorious commander whose RAF squadron was wiped out trying to disrupt Nazi invasion plans; and the German bomber pilot who fought the first battle involving foreign troops on British soil since Culloden, before repairing to a pub for a pint with soldiers who had taken him prisoner. Illus. with contemporary photos of pilots and their aircraft. 222 page paperback.

The Mass-Observation Archive is a priceless time capsule of ordinary voices that might otherwise have been forgotten. Throughout WW2, hundreds of people kept diaries of their private daily lives as part of a ground-breaking national experiment. They were warehousemen and WRENs, soldiers and farmhands, housewives and journalists, united only by a desire to record the history they were living through. These voices tell the very human story behind the iconic events of those six years, individuals grappling with a world turned upside down, from panic-buying and competitively digging for victory, to extraordinary acts of bravery, these experiences represent the best and worst of human nature in the face of adversity. A textile warehouseman from Birmingham on 5th September 1939 wrote: 'Mrs B - a medium, says she has been in touch with the spirit of Napoleon, who informed her that the war would last for 61 years. If I live I shall be 86 when peace comes. A leaden thought.' There are teachers, journalist and writers, artists, music teachers, widowed housewives, actors and accountants, laboratory technicians and personnel managers, vicars and farmers, each given their Diarist number, occupation, place and date. 312pp, these words are 'unmoved by what the beastly press says.'

Described as 'The missing link between Catch-22 and Black Adder', this book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is produced in a 50th anniversary edition with an introduction by James Holland. In March 1918, the Goshawk Squadron were on patrol, three days until the last great German offensive on the Western Front. One of the pilots unexpectedly suffered engine failure, in the days when the internal combustion engine was in its infancy. The pilot finds himself drifting, when suddenly a German Albatross creeps up behind him by making a near-suicidal manoeuvre through some trees. The pilot manages to escape. As he tries to climb, relieved, a Fokker Triplane stalks him on his blind side, opens fire and ruptures the pilot's fuel tank. White vapour appears, but although petrol begins soaking into his boots it is still inevitable that his plane and he will catch fire. The pilot then fishes out his revolver and fires three shots towards the Fokker, but to no avail and the German doesn't even flinch. The leaking fuel reaches the red-hot exhaust stubs, and the stricken aircraft erupts into flames. The pilot raises his pistol to his head and shoots himself - better a clean death than be burned alive in the skies over the Western Front. Exciting, taut and superbly described aerial combat is a feature of Goshawk Squadron and the many other novels of Derek Robinson with exquisitely drawn characters and shocking violence which befalls the men we come to care about because of their thoughts, personalities, attitudes and responses to the situations in which they find themselves. His books have prompted a certain amount of controversy in their depiction of the British class system, the recklessness and ill-preparedness of many of the men he has written about, and the casual violence they encounter. There has been a dramatic change in how we view the First World War since the novel was first published back in 1971, when veterans were not venerated in quite the same way they became. Stanley Woolley, the C.O. of Goshawk Squadron, is a character at first glance seen as an utter bastard, a martinet and a brutal driver of his men yet he is a complex character, fiercely intelligent, imaginative and above all humane, who understands that most of his men arriving into his squadron have done so with a misguided notion that flying over the Western Front will be exciting, chivalrous and sporting. Woolley through bitter experience has learned there is nothing noble about aerial combat. Incredibly young themselves, the flight lieutenants and squadron leaders, company commanders and naval first lieutenants pioneered new tactics and strove to become better combatants both for themselves and the men in their charge. Robinson captures Woolley's anger, frustration and cynicism perfectly, but also his fundamental decency. Woolley is just 23 years old. 284pp, paperback.

From Scipio Africanus who combined apparent mysticism with iron determination, to Caesar, the aggressive and charismatic aristocrat, Goldsworthy looks at Rome's greatest generals and how and why they won their victories. He tells the story of Roman warfare from the bitter struggle with Carthage and the brilliant Hannibal in the 3rd century BC, to the last desperate attempt to win back the Western Empire in the 6th century AD. He traces the evolution of the Roman Army and the Roman political system which directed it and we meet the conqueror of Macedonia Aemilius Paullus, read about the fall of Numantia, about Caius Marius, Sertorius and the Civil War, Pompey the Great, Caesar in Gaul, Caesar against Pompey, the Imperial 'Prince' Germanicus beyond the Rhine, the Imperial Legate Corbulo and Armenia, Titus and the Siege of Jerusalem, Trajan and the Dacian Wars, Julian in Gaul AD356-60 and Belisarius and the Persians. With 15 maps and diagrams, 480pp in paperback reprint of the 2003 original.

Hennessy was the pen name of John Harris, a highly inventive and versatile writer who drew heavily on his experiences in both the Navy and Air Force, serving in WW2. His novels reflect the reality of war mixed with a heavy dose of conflict and adventure and we have a pair of scintillating, full-throttle thrillers of the First World War, perfect for fans of Derek Robinson. Man against man, face to face, one machine against another. It was shortly after the outbreak of WW1 and Martin Falconer and his friend Frank were anxious to 'get into the scrap' as soon as possible, their youth blinding them to the real danger of it all. Geoffrey, Martin's elder brother, knew that it wasn't a game because he had fought in the trenches, been wounded and had seen friends die. For Geoffrey the R.F.C. offered an opportunity to escape the mud and horror of the Front, while for Martin and Frank it was the chance to be in at the start of a totally different kind of fighting. They were to be pioneers and risk everything to win. 292pp in reprinted paperback of the 1971 original, fairly large text.

A companion to The Fledglings code 91808, this is John Harris's gripping First World War novel for fans of Clive Cussler. To swing the tide of war you must take to the air once again. It was 1916 and the First World War still had two years to run. Martin Falconer, at 18 an experienced pilot with service in France to his credit, was kicking his heels in England, awaiting another posting to the Front. Throughout the spring he watched the progress of the war, especially the war in the air, acknowledging to himself the Germans' superiority. Their machines were better, and they had produced the war's best-known hero of the air, the Red Baron. British machines were poor, morale was low, and the odds were stacked against them. Finally at the beginning of April Martin was sent again to France, but this was the month that became known as Bloody April, when a pilot's life expectancy was two weeks, and Martin found himself in a unit demoralised and ill-managed. Harris's sombre picture of Britain at war is as compelling as only the truth can be. 283pp in facsimile reprint of the 1973 original. Fairly large print.

Following World War II, Stalin's Iron Curtain quickly descended, leaving only West Berlin as a democratic island within Communist eastern Europe. In 1948 Stalin blockaded all the land routes which brought in supplies. The Allied powers, now under new management as Roosevelt had died and Attlee had succeeded Churchill, decided at all costs to keep West Berlin supplied with necessities. The American General Clay was all for going overland with tanks, but it was clear that the Russians could halt any expedition by blowing up bridges and making the land route impassable. The solution was the Berlin airlift which lasted almost a year before Stalin admitted defeat. This photographic record of the airlift is accompanied by a detailed commentary on the progress of the operation. Starting with photos of the end of the war, with Russian soldiers raising their flag on the Reichstag and Americans in Grosser Stern, the situation changes quickly with a photo of static railway wagons at the border post of Helmstedt-Marienborn. By 28 June the tiny fighter station of Wunstorf became a major headquarters as eight Dakota squadrons arrived with full personnel. In November the Handley Page four-engine troop carrier, the largest built for the RAF, was brought into service, and meanwhile the propaganda war was being fought with posters such as the spectacular art deco design of "Coal to Berlin". A picture of an old woman scavenging for scraps of fuel indicates the hardship experienced by the Berliners. Finally, back in Helmstedt-Marienborn on 12 May 1949, the Russians are seen preparing to open the crossing. 184pp, softback, photos on most pages.