"We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind". So begins "A Very Queer Family Indeed", which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Bens...

When Dave Hickey was twelve, he rode the surfer's dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn't quite turn out – he shot the pier and dashed himself against the rocks of Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, which just abou...

Nili Gold, who was born in Haifa to German-speaking parents in 1948, the first year of Israeli statehood, here offers a remarkable homage to her native city during its heyday as an international port and cultural center. Spanning the 1920s and '30s,...

September 5, 1944 "The Americans are approaching; we follow their progress impatiently on the radio, by intercepting messages reserved for the commandos. They cannot be beaten now. But it is up to us to do the impossible to speed up the progression o...

On a typical day during the Second World War, Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, issued numerous memos to the ministers and service commanders on many different subjects, on both the grand strategy and the detail of the war...

Esmond Elliot, younger son of the Earl of Minto, Viceroy of India, was killed while serving with the Scots Guards, aged 22, at the beginning of the Passchendaele Offensive. Compiled from his grieving mother's memorial of his life, together with his...

Part history, part social documentary, part love story, this is a grandson's search for what his grandfather did in the Great War. Drawing on war diaries in the National Archives, unit records in the Royal Artillery museum, and a unique pictorial rec...

<p>An imaginative reassessment of Aethelred "the Unready", one of medieval England's most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure The Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred "the Unready" (978-1016) has long been considered to be ins...

Joshua Rubenstein's riveting account takes us back to the second half of 1952 when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin's murderous regime. He was poised to challenge the newly elected U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower with armed force, and wa...

<p>Henry IV (1399-1413), the son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, seized the English throne at the age of thirty-two from his cousin Richard II and held it until his death, aged forty-five, when he was succeeded by his son, Henry V. This comprehe...