Beginning with the medieval trial by ordeal, which entailed carrying a red-hot iron bar in your bare hand for a certain distance, through to the stretching on the rack of political prisoners and the mutilation of those found guilty of sedition, the evidence clearly shows that Britain has relied heavily upon torture, both at home and abroad, for almost the whole of its history. Branding with red-hot irons of blasphemers during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, libelling the monarch in Elizabethan England could result in having the right hand chopped off, the rack, breaking on the wheel (occasionally inflicted in Scotland but never in England), thumb screws used with a variety of names such as pilliwinks, slaves branded and whipped, gibbetting alive by hanging a man in chains to die of exposure and thirst, roasting over a slow fire prolonging death for hours, hanging drawing and quartering, the pillory being stoned to death, the ducking stool, flogging in the 1860s and medieval waterboarding used as late as the 1970s by the British Army in Northern Ireland are illustrated and described. Not a book for the fainthearted. 145pp.

During World War II around 50,000 German soldiers deserted from their units, of whom around 20,000 were executed by shooting, beheading or hanging. The British Army in World War I had executed 306 deserters, some as young as 16, young boys who panicked in the face of fire, and the author traces a direct link between this barbarity and the German judicial executions for desertion in World War II. He tells the poignant stories of many young men who were executed, but principal sources are the experiences of three who survived and suffered ostracism and discrimination for the whole of the rest of their lives. Their legal position remained equivocal because although the Nazi party was defeated and condemned, the execution of deserters had happened under the rule of law, even though these were the increasingly paranoid laws enacted by Hitler. Those who were unfit to serve through illness were executed as being a burden on the state, and the law did not allow for conscientious objection. 270 Jehovah's Witnesses were executed on account of their religious beliefs. In 1938 the statutes were tightened to allow no appeal. Only a handful survived to see the half-hearted rehabilitation law passed by the Bundestag more than half a century later. Peter Schilling, who at first embraced Nazi ideology, escaped to Switzerland over the border and was relegated to a refugee camp. Ludwig Baumann deserted from the French navy base in Bordeaux in June 1942 with his friend Kurt, stealing weapons and ammunition, but a border patrol picked them up. Tortured during interrogation they were condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted and Ludwig spent the war in military prison, suffering from diphtheria and forced to watch daily executions. Objector Helmut Kober was shocked by Hitler's book-burning and the complicity of the Nazi bishops. Following the war, former Nazis were elevated to high positions while those who had resisted faced a continuing stigma. 173 pp, case histories, photos.

Following the horrors of the Great War, people wanted to forget its horrors and have fun in any way they could. A young man from a far-off feudal world found entertainment in royal palaces, on battleships and in brothels. During his few months in London, high society and affairs of state were to collide with a city's underworld and a ring of globe-trotting conmen. The scandal that followed rocked the world and its aftermath remains to this day. The young man was Rajah Sir Hari Singh, heir to the Maharajah of Kashmir. His downfall was to meet an adventuress called Maud, and her associates, the Mayfair Mob. When the Rajah came to London in 1919, his first time in Europe, between visits to the King and Queen and the Prince of Wales, he was introduced by his aide de Camp to Mrs Maud, Maudie Robinson. They became lovers and spent Christmas in Paris where they were 'discovered' in bed together. The Rajah parted with cheques to the equivalent today of £14 million in hush money to stop Maudie's husband citing him in a divorce action. The plot was planned by his trusted friend and aide Charles Arthur, an Irish nobleman, along with Monty Newton, a notorious card sharp, and William Cooper Hobbs, a crooked solicitor's clerk and the Mr Big of the London underworld. But were Maudie and her husband also in on the plot? And if so, how were they cheated out of all but £21,000 of the blackmail pay-out? When they found out, the ensuing court case gave Sir Hari a nickname that haunted him forever: 'Mr A'. The British Government imposed the greatest secrecy on the case, keeping files closed for 70 and 100 years rather than the usual 30. Records only recently released by the National Archives throw new light on the court case that gripped the world for eight days in 1924 and which was to have repercussions that last to this day in the fraught relations between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Monty was saved by the intervention of his partner in crime Lemoine, a German working for French Intelligence who, in 1931, bought the working manuals of the new German Enigma encoding machine from a clerk so that, in 1932, a young Polish mathematician could crack the code. This is five years before Alan Turing even thought of studying cryptology. The book follows Newton and Lemoine around the world from Monte Carlo to Mexico, always staying in the best hotels, as they con the rich and gullible out of their millions. 288pp, photos.

'Personal Encounters With An Architect of Genocide', this is a chilling portrait of Radovan Karadzic, giving us an eye-opening new context not only for the Bosnian War, but also how fear can be harnessed and diverted to violent political ends. A remarkable blend of biography, history and psychiatry, the book is based on extraordinary access to a notorious Serbian leader and is scrupulously researched by this skilled interviewer. Stern explores the boundaries of good and evil through hours of interviews with the convicted mass murderer and complex emotions are unleashed on both sides as the interviewer circles a wily subject charmed at skill, obfuscation, misdirection and intimidation. It is an investigation into the nature of violence, terror and trauma. Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held this series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with the Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes. The encounter would alter her understandings of the mechanics of fear, motivations of violence and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities on a state level who target non-combatants in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbours? What happens when an ethnic or racial group loses its dominant position in society? How do leaders harness fear and weaponize it and target minorities with violence? What is the 'eco system' that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders and could anything about their personal histories, personalities or exposure to historical trauma shed light on their behaviour? Karadzic was once a brilliant and often charming psychiatrist and poet who spent 12 years in hiding, disguising himself as an energy healer. A deeply insightful and chilling book. 304pp.

Rare photographs from wartime archives, many of which are very distressing showing heaps of dead bodies, elderly Jews, women and children, wearing the star of David waiting selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sonderkommandos assisted the newly arrived transports. The other principal groups of 'helpers' were Kapos and Trawniki. The Nazis' vast concentration camp network and later the Final Solution programme made heavy demands on the SS whose responsibility it was. The use of 'overseers' minimised costs and enabled the camps to run with fewer SS personnel. The super commandoes' duties included unloading Jews from trains, collecting their possessions and sorting them for storage. Under the supervision of the SS, their main assignment was to run the gas chambers and crematoria. The Kapos oversaw the Sonderkommandos. Many were originally prisoner functionaries recruited from violent criminal gangs and they had a well-deserved reputation for brutality. The third group known as Trawniki or Trawnikimänner were Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from Russian PoW camps. While some served in a military capacity, others played an instrumental role in the Holocaust programme, rounding up and transporting Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. Whilst the Sonderkommandos were forced to undertake various grisly tasks, with the added fear of being killed at any moment, the Kapos and Trawniki competed without scruple to maintain the favour of their SS masters while pitting victim against victim. Very little text, the book is in the Images of War series and reproduces approximately 200 rare contemporary archive images of forced labour, known personnel and very harrowing images such as skeletal corpses being dragged in irons by the head and pushed into the oven for incineration (which normally took 45 minutes to one hour). 114pp, large softback.

The author's paternal great grandparents, Charles Ernest Hardy and Edwin Hall Bailey, both worked in collieries in the Barnsley area as did their descendants. At the end of 2017 author Jane Ainsworth transcribed a ledger containing the minutes of the Colliers' Relief Fund Committee of the 1847 Oaks Colliery Explosion for Barnsley Archives. This stimulated her empathy with and curiosity about the lives of the people referred to in the Minutes, widows, orphans and a few survivors of the disaster as well as the 73 victims. Despite the challenge of limited early records, she fleshed out the stories and pays tribute to the families of mineworkers whose lives at the time were considered of little value to the colliery owners and managers. She has created a memorial book like no other and a contribution to Barnsley's mining heritage. She has researched dozens of images which are reproduced to the best possible quality given their age, many woodcuts, images of graves and newspaper articles to tell the story of Richard and Thomas Beardshal, Francis Birtles, Robert Hazle (Hessle), William, William, John and Luke Roe (Wroe) from the family who suffered the largest loss of life with four members killed in the explosion on 5th March 1847. For each there are details of who they married and in which church, how many children and how intertwined the families were and how widows like Rebecca Roe (1804-1881) would have struggled to support her family, even with relief from the Subscriptions Fund. She returned to Alfreton with her children to avoid the threat of being admitted to Barnsley Union Workhouse, but she suffered another three deaths there. Also includes hand drawn maps and early views of Barnsley in etchings. 270 page large softback.

The spy craft expert Schlesinger has produced the first book to fully examine the oldest and consistently effective piece of tradecraft, from the ancient world to cyber seductions. While the so-called 'honey trap' is a Hollywood cliché, it is also employed by virtually every intelligence service in times of war and peace. The work of femmes fatales and Romeo spies have shaped policy and history through seduction, betrayal and scandal. 'Ashamed? Not in the least. My superiors told me that the results of my work saved thousands of British and American lives... Wars are not won by respectable methods' - Amy Elizabeth Thorpe (Betty Pack), participant in a honey trap run by British and American intelligence services during WW2. The Stasi proved particularly adept in employing Romeo spies to romance women with access to secrets. More recently in 2013 FBI wire traps caught two Russian SVR lamenting the more mundane aspects of spy work and not receiving permission to play a Romeo spy. Today the Mata Hari tale has expanded into pop culture and with the increased portability of cameras, honey traps can now be more effectively executed and indeed there no longer needs to be physical contact. From the Bible's Judith and Delilah, Pandora, Chinese, Greek and Indian brothels and myths of love-allurement, here are merry monarchs, plotters and pimps, the Flying Squadron created by Catherine de Medici of gorgeous women despatched to foreign and domestic leaders acting as sexual shock groups, the Restoration, Hamilton in America before we see the modern era. 352 magnificent large pages.

The Mr Big of Criminal Briefs offers a fascinating insight into life at the top of the profession, lifting the lid on the psychology of those who end up on the wrong side of the law - and those who defend them. Outsiders might wonder about how criminal defence lawyers deal with potentially dangerous clients, what happens behind the scenes when building a defence, and that age-old moral dilemma, how can a lawyer defend someone they think is guilty. But what is life really like for those tasked with representing the shadowy underbelly of society? For over 40 years, criminal defence solicitor Henry Milner has been the go-to lawyer for some of Britain's most notorious criminals, including Kenneth Noye and the Brink's-Mat robbers, Freddie Foreman, John 'Goldfinger' Palmer, and the gang behind the Millennium Dome raid. He evokes a bygone era of the criminal justice system with plenty of wry self-deprecating humour, sometimes very funny and never ever dull. 263pp, colour photos.

Mariella Novotny was found dead with her face in a bowl of milk pudding in February 1983. She was in the process of writing her memoirs. 'It's dynamite!' Christine Keeler said, 'I think it was murder...most probably by the CIA.' In 1961, Mariella was an underage hooker engaging in sexual relations with President John F. Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world. She was believed to be part of a vice ring set up by an alleged Communist agent who was also a well-known British film producer. FBI officers called their investigation 'The Bow-Tie Case'. Two years later the young 'Monroe lookalike' played a major part in another sex scandal with implications for national security - the Profumo Affair. Mariella was the hostess of the Man in the Mask party. She was a close friend of Stephen Ward, the osteopath and pander to high society, another putative whistle-blower who died in suspicious circumstances. In the late 1960s, she gave birth to the illegitimate child of Eddie Chapman (Agent Zigzag), England's most successful wartime double agent. Between 1975 and 1978 she was working undercover for Operation Countryman, an investigation into police corruption in the Flying Squad. Her chief target was the author's grandfather, Charlie Taylor, a London conman who had high-ranking officers in his deep pockets. Mariella brought them all down. An excerpt from the chapter entitled Black Power and Rotting Hill: 'Michael came to London. He worked his way into the veins of criminal society. In Notting Hill, he managed prostitutes, ran gambling houses, sold drugs and collected rent for the property racketeer Peter Rachman, who had already had a go at bedding Mariella and blackmailing Hod.' Includes colour photos including Soho in the early 60s and Mariella on her wedding day to Hod Dibben. 253 pages.

Life, sex, race, power, free speech, protest, privacy, democracy, sovereignty, death. Society shapes law, and law shapes society. We like to imagine that progress comes about when Parliament spots a looming groundswell in public opinion and responds by changing the laws that govern our daily lives. This is not always true. In his fascinating book, Inigo Bing unravels 10 legal cases in which the decisions of judges or a jury either heralded a shift in outlook, or forced Parliament to respond to simmering social change. The cases include Conjoined Twins, Lady Chatterley on Trial, The Cricketer and the Hotel, The Pilot Officer and the Home Secretary, The Thalidomide Scandal, Peaceful Protest in a Demographic Society, Spanish Ships and Metric Martyrs with regard to sovereignty and Death and Euthanasia. Taken together these stories provide 80 years of insight into the British political, social and cultural history, some cases exploring when rapid technological change outpaces government or urgent ethical dilemmas. All of them have had a lasting impact on the society in which we live. Inigo Bing is a respected judge. 316pp.