Showing titles in 20th Century

Spanning 1940 to 1965, this volume picks up shortly after Winston Churchill became prime minister - when Britain stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany. The Churchill described here is a man of courage, intellect, and an irresistible will to action.

Nazi Germany didn’t start with tanks, camps, or war. It began with political chaos, inflation, and a nation hunting “enemies within.” Hitler was voted in, welcomed, and normalized long before dictatorship was obvious. He promised to make Germany “great” again. If you’ve ever wondered why millions backed Hitler, why people watched Jewish neighbors disappear and stayed silent, why propaganda and strongman politics keep returning, or how a democracy can die quietly through fear, division, and a leader promising to fix everything, this audiobook tells the story clearly from start to finish.

The story of a fascinating man who connected the great politicians, artists and thinkers at the height of British global power and influence. A famed aesthete, politician and patron of the arts, Philip Sassoon lived in a world of English elegance and oriental flair. Gathering a social set that...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The exhilarating true story of the U.S. Navy’s improbable victory at the Battle of Samar—“a dire survival-at-sea saga” (Denver Post) from the acclaimed author of Neptune’s Inferno “A critically acclaimed, blow-by-blow look at a small American force...

How much can change in less than two and a half years? In the case of Britain in the Sixties, the answer is: almost everything. From the seismic coming of the Beatles to a sex scandal that rocked the Tory government to the arrival at No 10 of Harold Wilson, a prime minister utterly different from his Old Etonian predecessors. A Northern Wind, the keenly anticipated next instalment of David Kynaston’s acclaimed Tales of a New Jerusalem series, brings to vivid life the period between October 1962 and February 1965.

From the foremost historian of 20th century Spain, A People Betrayed is the story of the devastating betrayal of Spain by its political class, its military and its Church. This comprehensive history of modern Spain chronicles the fomenting of violent social division throughout the country by...

By the time of her execution at thirty-six, Maria Mandl had achieved the highest rank possible for a woman in the Third Reich. As Head Overseer of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was personally responsible for the murders of thousands, and for the torture and suffering of countless more. Susan J. Eischeid explores how Mandl, regarded locally as “a nice girl from a good family,” came to embody the very worst of humanity. Her life mirrors the period in which she lived: turbulent, violent, and suffused with paradoxes.

"Water Mirror Echo is a remarkable story of a man, the traditions and communities that created him, and the new worlds he made possible. Like Bruce Lee himself, Jeff Chang is blessed with the vision to see things we do not yet see, thinking and writing with a restless, chasm-crossing, almost...

A publishing sensation, the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. 'A classic ... Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank's' SUNDAY TIMES 'I can't remember when I read a more engrossing book'...

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America's fundamental miscalculations during its ruinous, decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons programme, Steve Coll traces Saddam's motives through understanding his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader.

On 12th April 1981 a revolutionary new spacecraft blasted off from Florida on her maiden flight. NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia was the most advanced flying machine ever built – the high watermark of post-war aviation development. A direct descendant of the record-breaking X-planes the likes...

The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse.

An Aspects of History Best Book of the Year; An Engelsberg Ideas Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the HWA Non-fiction Crown Award ‘A rigorous, myth-busting look at the city’s chaotic recovery in the wake of war and fascism’ FINANCIAL TIMES This is the first major history of wartime...

The United States Navy won such overwhelming victories in 1944 that, had the navy faced a different enemy, the war would have been over at the conclusion of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. However, in the moment of victory on 25 October 1944, the US Navy found itself confronting a frightening enemy that had been unimaginable until it appeared. The kamikaze, 'divine wind' in Japanese, was something Americans were totally unprepared for – a shocking violation of every belief held in the West.

In January of 1943, fourteen-year-old Basha Anush and her family were dragged from their home in Pruzhany, Poland by Nazi troops and shipped off to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. Within days, five members of her family would be dead and she would be subjected to two-and-a-half years of abuse, a death march into Germany, and months of roaming with other homeless girls when the Third Reich collapsed.

The Third Reich cast a long shadow, not least over those born in Germany at that time. Whether the children of Nazi perpetrators or Holocaust survivors, they all had to come to terms with their dark past, based on an inhuman racial ideology. Renate was born in 1941, the daughter of an unknown SS...

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1943. Toen hij haar voor het eerst zag, wist David Wisnia direct dat Helen 'Zippi' Spitzer bijzonder was. David en Zippi werden elkaars lichtpunt in de duisternis. Daar, op de onwaarschijnlijkste plek ter wereld, bloeide een grote liefde op. In 1944, toen het Russische leger Auschwitz naderde, dwongen de nazi's de gevangenen het kamp te verlaten; de zogeheten dodenmarsen. David en Zippi deden elkaar een belofte: als ze de oorlog overleefden, zouden ze in Warschau op elkaar wachten. Het zou zeventig jaar duren voor hij antwoorden kreeg.

A bold and sweeping history of modern South Asia, told through the five partitions that reshaped it. As recently as 1928, a vast swath of Asia stretching from the Red Sea to the borders of Thailand was bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the “Indian...

A power-hungry baroness with two lovers disrupts life on an Eden-like island in the Galápagos, and an isolated community descends into madness and murder—a true story of utopia gone wrong from New York Times bestselling author Abbott Kahler. “Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale confronts...

“For six days, it was the Iranian Embassy on Princes Gate in London that riveted the world. . . . Macintyre’s superb reconstruction restores it to vivid, complex life.”—The Washington Post A thrilling tick-tock recounting of one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue...