The author of Little Women wrote personal letters which provide a raw and honest account of the reality of battlefield medicine during the American Civil War, a war which tore the country and families apart. Her compassionate narrative also highlights the under-appreciated role of women in medicine. While serving as a volunteer nurse for the Union Army, Louisa May Alcott recorded her experiences in the letters she sent home, later published as Hospital Sketches from the Civil War. 'A good fit of illness proves the value of health; real danger tries one's metal; and self-sacrifice sweetens character.' 'Although the manliest man among my forty, he said, 'Yes, ma'am', like a little boy; received suggestions for his comfort with the quick smile that brightened his whole face; and now and then, as I stood tidying the table by his bed, I felt him softly touch my gown, as if to assure himself that I was there. Anything more natural and frank I never saw...' Beautiful, wistful. 112pp, paperback.

Western culture has a popular tradition of women who dressed as men and joined the military, often immortalised in books or on stage and screen. Julie Wheelwright soon discovered many of these accounts are highly fictionalised and the real experience of warrior women was frequently one of isolation as they strove to maintain their disguise or, latterly, having to prove their worth against the men in a mixed regiment. 'She brings their temperaments, talents, fancies, and foibles to life.' - Professor Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London. Sisters in Arms charts the evolution of women in combat, from the Scythian warriors who inspired the Amazonian myth, to the passing soldiers and sailors of the eighteenth century, and on to the re-emergence of women as official members of the armed forces in the twentieth century. The female warrior often endured judgement and poverty and although some managed to fight for a pension, make a living from memoirs or settle back into domestic life, the majority faced hardship, obscurity and worse. Wheelwright uses verifiable official documents, diaries, letters and memoirs from the mid-18th century on as she follows the evolution of women in combat, both clandestine and as recognised soldiers, and shows us shocking parallels between the two experiences, such as the fight for acceptance, for equal pay and against the threat of sexual assault, which both how much and how little things have changed. 16 pages of excellent b/w plates, 320pp.

Winner of the Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2019 this is a 'propulsive, beautifully written investigation into atrocity, guilt and new beginnings.' - Justine Jordan. One rainswept winter's night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain. Gradually he recovers his health, but not his peace of mind. He will not and cannot talk about the war or face the memory of what took place on the retreat to Corunna. After the command comes to return to his regiment, Lacroix sets out instead for the Hebrides, unaware that he has far worse to fear than being dragged back to the army - a vicious English corporal and a Spanish officer with secret orders are on his trail, and for him, freedom will come at a high price. In luminous prose, the author portrays a man shattered by what he has witnessed, on a journey that leads to unexpected friendships, even to love. A deeply involving novel, part pastoral comedy and passionate romance story, alternating with a blackly menacing thriller about male violence, the impact of war and the price of freedom. 422pp, paperback.

One of the most wrenching and scandalous love stories in all of literary biography, the author finely details the last productive years of Ernest Hemingway in a kaleidoscopic succession of relationships, passions, trips, editorial disputes, drinking binges and his contradictory nature set against the backdrop of northeast Italy. It is the remarkable story of his love affair with the city of Venice and the muse he found there. In the autumn of 1948, Hemingway was approaching the age of 50 and had not published a novel in nearly a decade. He travelled for the first time to Venice and there met and fell in love with a striking young woman named Adriana Ivancich. What followed was a platonic love affair. He continued to visit her in Venice and she in turn came to Cuba while he wrote 'The Old Man and the Sea'. This illuminating story examines the cost to a young woman of her relationship with a literary celebrity, and takes an intimate look at the fractured heart and changing art of Hemingway's secret desires, successes and depressive obstacles. 348pp in illustrated paperback.

Journalist Walter Shapiro always assumed that the stories about his great uncle Freeman Bernstein, particularly the one where he conned Hitler's war effort out of a valuable shipload of scrap metal, were just urban myths, particularly as other family members were law-abiding types with a healthy respect for the long arm of the law. This is the story of a professional swindler with a phenomenal gift of the gab, told in racy style to match the subject's extraordinary career. The story starts in Hollywood in 1937, where Freeman went up to see Mae West with a consignment of jewels from which the streetwise star easily extracted the best pieces, leaving Freeman with the junk, though she rewarded him with several pages in her autobiography. Freeman knew he was wanted by several police departments and submitted to arrest quietly as he left Mae's apartment block. In fact the charge was defrauding Hitler, to which he responded with the immortal line, "Hitler ain't got a thing on me". The son of Polish immigrants, Freeman got on the rung of showbusiness with a vaudeville arcade, inching his way towards Hollywood by fleeing from serial bankruptcies and dud cheques. His fortunes turned when he signed on the popular artiste May Ward, whom he married to cement the contract, and in World War I they had considerable success entertaining the troops. But Freeman could never go straight, and soon he and May had perfected the Anniversary Gag in which cruise ship passengers were conned into believing they were celebrating an anniversary and were then cheated at cards. The crowning con of Freeman's career was exporting scrap-metal claiming it was valuable nickel, swindling his Nazi clients with the time-honoured method of providing a few inspection bags of the real thing. 430pp, photos. Remainder mark.

'Written with a novelist's narrative flair and a biographer's factual command, Shorr recreates and reassesses the lives of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Joan of Arc at their hour of reckoning.' - John Lahr. Jane Austen was poor in 1802, unmarried and homeless. She had outlines, ideas and first drafts of her future novels, but no place to sit and write them. It is at this bleak moment that she receives an offer of marriage from a rich man. This multifaceted biography takes us to the hour of her decision between financial security and her writing life. She accepted his proposal, only to withdraw it. When 16-year-old Mary Godwin elopes to France with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she scoffs at the cost - life as an outcast. Together they travel through Europe, reading and writing, but at the point of this biography we find her alone, eight years later, pacing a terrace overlooking the Italian shore, watching for Shelley to sail home over stormy seas in a shaky boat. She writes Frankenstein as her life careens out of control. Joan of Arc, imprisoned in chains, kept her faith for a long year. 'Be brave, daughter of God' her saints had whispered, 'You will be saved' - and she believes it, until she is taken to be burned at the stake. The biography tells the story of her final days, between her terrified recantation and her heroic return to the stake. Richly detailed in descriptions and feelings, we really feel we are with these women at their decisive moments in life. 299pp.

Born in the Staffordshire potteries in 1739, Josiah Wedgwood was from a family of potters who worked in traditional ways, but he was to revolutionise the industry. When he started work, the local ware was rather rustic, and made to look more sophisticated with heavy glazes. Wedgwood worked to produce a lighter coloured body and to use designs to appeal to aristocratic tastes, convinced the middle class would follow fashion. The result was cream ware which, when a whole service was ordered by the royal family, was soon christened Queen's Ware. Wedgwood needed to import new materials - flint from East Anglia, light clays from the West Country, and so became an ardent promoter of the Trent and Mersey Canal, and built a new factory and family home on its banks, naming the area Etrura. In the new works he abandoned old systems where individual craftsmen produced whole pieces to bring in an early form of mass production. His ceramics are still world famous such as the distinctive Jasperware. Wedgwood was one of the earliest supporters of the Anti Slavery Movement, studied science and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work on high temperature thermometers. This edition incorporates new colour plates to the updated 1976 edition with a heavy reliance on letters, many quoted in full. 218pp.

Colonel Blood was the spy who stole the crown jewels and became the king's secret agent. One morning in May 1671, this man daringly attempted to seize the crown jewels from the Tower of London. Astonishingly he managed to escape with his haul before being apprehended. Yet he was not executed for treason. Instead, King Charles II decided that the audacious thief was more useful to him alive, and appointed him his personal spy. The notorious turncoat Colonel Thomas Blood had been previously involved in countless plots to assassinate the restored Stuart king. Bestselling historian Robert Hutchinson paints a vivid story of a double agent bent on political ambition and personal gain, including his involvement in an attempted coup d'état in Ireland and to overthrow the lawful governments of Ireland and Scotland and England in the late 17th century which won him widespread notoriety in the three kingdoms. Charles II's ministers publicly branded him the 'Father of all Treasons' and Blood became a hunted man throughout the length and breadth of the British Isle. Blood was an arrogant, eccentric fantasist with a very persuasive manner, reinforced by buckets of Irish charm, and armed with a neat turn of phrase that proved useful in a tight spot. He conducted his escapades under a multitude of aliases and assisted by a wardrobe packed full of disguises. We are drawn back to the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1653 and the momentous events and conspiracies that abounded in Restoration England. 341pp, paperback, 13 photos including colour plates.

Sub-titled 'The Queen Who Challenged Rome and Conquered Eternity', more than a muse and greater than a myth, Cleopatra was ruler, lover, diplomat and icon. The last Queen of Egypt lived less than 40 years and yet her legacy has spanned centuries. Shakespeare gave Cleopatra speech. Michelangelo gave Cleopatra a face. Elizabeth Taylor gave Cleopatra a voice, but who was she really? Alberto Angela travels back in time to uncover the woman who shaped the ancient world. At just 20 years of age she was already one of the most notorious women in Rome - a wife, mother and more importantly Queen of an ever-expanding empire. We follow young Cleopatra from sitting in her makeup chair, basking in the glamour of her gilded residence to commanding her own fleet alongside her lover Mark Antony on the story Mediterranean, risking shipwreck for strategic victory. The book celebrates her beauty, charisma and ground-breaking leadership and ably reconstructs the epic Ancient Egypt that made her who she is, teeming with political intrigue, forbidden romance and unforgettable battles. Here is the Battle of Philippi, and the Battle of Actium and the dawn of an empire and how she developed an extraordinary talent for strategy in the field of geopolitics and at the same time managed to seduce and conquer some of Rome's greatest men like Caesar and Mark Antony. Cleopatra was present at the exact stage when the long history of the kingdoms of Egypt including the pharaohs ended, and that of the Roman Empire began through the principate of Augustus. The book focusses specifically on the 14 year period between March 44BC and August 30BC and beings with six important names connected to power - Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, Mark Antony, Octavian and Cleopatra against the backdrop of three continents - Europe, Asia and Africa, from the River Nile to the mountainous expanses of Armenia, from Cleopatra's palaces to Caesar's home, from the Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Roman Senate, from the Greek coast to the arid areas of the Middle East. The narrative style helps breathe life into actual, experienced history preserved by precious ancient texts and plausible reconstructions, archaeological data and in parts fictionalised but based on faithful historical location and customs of the time. Enjoy the book. 426pp.

'The Life and Death of Count Cagliostro and His Egyptian Rite' is the sub-title of this first English translation of the Egyptian Rite ever published. It tells the extraordinary story of a cult figure of European society in the tumultuous years leading up to the French Revolution. An alchemist, healer and Freemason, Count Alessandro Cagliostro inspired devotion and ridicule as well as novels by Alexander Dumas, a drama by Goethe, and Mozart's opera 'The Magic Flute'. Cagliostro's sincere belief in magical powers including immortality, conferred by his Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry, won him fame but made him dangerous enemies too. His celebrated travels through the Middle East and the capitals of Europe ended abruptly in Rome in 1789 where he was arrested by Inquisition and condemned to death for heresy. The authors examine the case made against him, that he was an impostor as well as a heretic, and find that the Roman Church and history itself have done Cagliostro a terrible injustice. They draw on new documentary evidence to prove him a genuine visionary and a true champion of Freemasonry, and his teachings have much to reveal to us today not just of the secrets of Freemasonry, but of the mysterious hostility the movement continues to attract. Cagliostro is remembered for his alchemical operations and there is an account of how on the 7th June 1780 he transmuted base metal into silver during a visit to a Masonic Lodge in Warsaw - see page 46. With 16 pages of photos, many in colour, there are 36 plates in total plus 11 illustrations including the magical consecration of a sword from the Key of Solomon, Vitruvian Man by da Vinci, the Alphabet of the Magi, and Cagliostro's Magical Seals. 317pp in large softback by the famous occult publisher Watkins.