Showing results by publisher "Bloomsbury Publishing Plc" in History

From his earliest days Winston Churchill was an extreme risk taker, and he carried this into adulthood. Today he is widely hailed as Britain’s greatest wartime leader and politician. Deep down though, he was foremost a warlord. In this audiobook, historian Anthony Tucker-Jones explores the record of Winston Churchill as a military commander, assessing how the military experiences of his formative years shaped him for the difficult military decisions he took in office. This audiobook assesses his choices in the some of the most controversial and high-profile campaigns of World War II.

The 'Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club' was the tongue-in-cheek nickname of the US Seventh Fleet that was stationed off the coast of Vietnam and this book tells the full story of the US Naval air campaign in the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1975.

Putin's Wars is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers.

Here are some of the best of Churchill’s letters, many of a more personal and intimate nature, presented in chronological order, with a preface to each letter explaining the context. The recipients include a vast range of people, including his schoolmaster, his American grandmother and former President Eisenhower. They are taken from within the Churchill Archive in Cambridge, where there is a mass of Churchill’s correspondence. Several of the letters included have never appeared in book form before.

The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. And, as Kenneth Harl illustrates in this glorious work of narrative history, their deeds still resonate today. Professor Kenneth Harl draws on a lifetime of scholarship to vividly recreate the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age.

Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave, E. M. Forster’s conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria, desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead, the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies.

'The Editor of Wisden is an important personage. It is he who decides the policy of the Cricketers’ Bible and cricketers the world over look to him to give a lead on all controversial problems. His is, therefore, no easy task, but Wisden has been fortunate in its editors.' That was written in 1933, and it is still true. The heart of the Almanack is the section entitled "Notes by the Editor". The editor's opinions can change careers, laws - indeed every part of the game. 

Stalingrad ranks as one of the most infamous, savage and emotive battles of the 20th century. It has consumed military historians since the 1950s and has inspired many books and much debate. This book tells the story of the operation mounted by the Luftwaffe to supply, by airlift, the trapped and exhausted German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/43. Using previously unpublished diaries, original Luftwaffe reports and specially commissioned artwork, this gripping battle is told in detail through the eyes of the Luftwaffe commanders and pilots.

This audiobook is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and diverse territory. The audiobook then examines how the Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines.

King Henry V’s victory over the French armies at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 is unquestionably one of the most famous battles in history. From Shakespeare’s ‘band of brothers’ speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose names are immediately recognized around the world. Agincourt provides a new look at this battle. Mike Livingston goes back to the original sources, including the French battle plan that still survives today, to give a new interpretation, one that challenges the traditional site of the battlefield itself.

At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global history. Assyria’s wide-ranging conquests have long been known from the Hebrew Bible and later Greek accounts. But nearly two centuries of research now permit a rich picture of the Assyrians and their empire beyond the battlefield.

In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing’s Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life. In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao’s court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths.

Dotted across homes in Britain are people who were witnesses to one of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century. Yet their memory of India’s partition has been shrouded in silence. Kavita Puri’s father was 12 when he found himself one of the millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims caught up in the devastating aftermath of a hastily drawn border. For 70 years he remained silent - like so many - about the horrors he had seen.

Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born of a German father and a Russian mother in Baku in 1895, he moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. A member of the angry and deluded generation who found new, radical faiths after their experiences on the battlefields of the First World War, Sorge became a fanatical communist - and the Soviet Union’s most formidable spy.

The American Revolution, or the American War of Independence, has been characterized politically as a united political uprising of the American colonies and militarily as a guerrilla campaign of colonists against the inflexible British military establishment. In this book, Daniel Marston argues that this belief, though widespread, is a misconception. He contends that the American Revolution, in reality, created deep political divisions in the population of the Thirteen Colonies, while militarily pitting veterans of the Seven Years' War against one another.

In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outwards. Over the next three years, he travelled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. 

'Can’t you just explain the Israel situation to me? In, like, 10 minutes or less?' This is the question Daniel Sokatch is used to answering on an almost daily basis as the head of the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to equality and democracy for all Israelis, not just Jews. Can We Talk About Israel? is the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, grappling with a century-long struggle between two peoples that both perceive themselves as (and indeed are) victims.

One hundred and sixty-five million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. Sixty-six million years ago was the first melody. Forty thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument. Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story.

A riveting narrative of Wall Street buccaneering, political intrigue and two of American history’s most colossal characters, struggling for mastery in an era of social upheaval and rampant inequality. Today, as the country again asks whether saving democracy means taming capital, the lessons of Roosevelt and Morgan’s time are more urgent than ever.

Lawrence of Arabia is one of the most iconic figures of the First World War, seen by many as a heroic and romantic guerrilla leader in a period of savage and deeply impersonal industrial warfare. While Lawrence himself has been the subject of many biographies and an award-winning film, the context of his war in the desert, and his ideas on war itself, are less well-known. Lawrence of Arabia on War is a study of those ideas and of his campaign of irregular warfare which has informed tactical theory and decision-making down to the present day.