Few episodes in warfare are as famous as the evacuation of the British expeditionary force and many French troops from Dunkirk. It was a very British success, pulling something of a victory from the jaws of defeat – a triumph in the face of catastrop...

Decorated Polish fighter pilot Witold "Lanny" Lanowski tells his remarkable Second World War story beginning with his dramatic escape from Nazi aggression in Poland, fighting with the reformed Polish Air Force in France, and eventually arriving in En...

For sale in CIS only! In mid 2012 the previously almost forgotten Syrian Kurds suddenly emerged as a potential game-changer in the country's civil war when in an attempt to consolidate its increasingly desperate position the Assad government abruptl...

Exhilaration and anxiety, the yearning for community and the quest for identity: these shared, contradictory feelings course through "Outside the Gates of Eden", Peter Bacon Hales's ambitious and intoxicating new history of America from the atomic ag...

Like some astronomers, who discover cosmic objects not by direct observation, but by watching the deviations of known heavenly bodies from their calculated trajectories, Peter Mezhiritsky makes his findings in history through thoughtful reading and t...

Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized and helped to carry out the forced relocation of German speakers from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable – between 1...

When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle – he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture's central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myt...

For sale in CIS only! The October War of 1973 (also known as the 'Yom Kippur War') was a watershed moment in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the modern Middle East more broadly. It marked the beginning of a US-led peace process between...

A member of the unique generation of African writers and intellectuals who came of age in the last days of colonialism, Wole Soyinka has witnessed the promise of independence and lived through postcolonial failure. He deeply comprehends the pressing...

For sale in CIS only! Orientalism is a system of truths that imagines the world can be meaningfully understood in terms of a distinction between 'West' and 'East' from the Greek and Persian Wars onwards. It is also about an institutionalised communi...