After the Great War, the millions killed on the battlefields were eclipsed by the millions more civilians carried off by disease & starvation when the conflict was over. Haunted by memories, the Allies were determined that the end of the Second World War would not be followed by a similar disaster, & they began to lay plans long before victory was assured. Confronted by an entire continent starving & uprooted, Allied planners devised strategies to help all `displaced persons`, & repatriate the fifteen million people who had been deprived of their homes & in many cases forced to work for the Germans. But over a million Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians & Yugoslavs refused to go home. This book offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World War II. Unlike most recent writing about the 1940s, it assesses the events & personalities of that decade in terms of contemporary standards & values. This the true & epic story of how millions ultimately found relief, reconciliation & a place to call home. ...

What happens to a man who has his ear pressed to the lives of others but not much life of his own? When Stephen Donaldson joins the Institute, he anticipates excitement, romance & new status. Instead he gets the tape-recorded conversations of ancient communists & ineffectual revolutionaries, until the day he is assigned a new case: the ultra-secret Phoenix. Is Phoenix really working for a foreign power? Stephen hardly cares; it is the voice of the target`s wife that mesmerises him. This is December 1981. Bombs are exploding, a cold war is being waged, another war is just over the horizon & the nation is transfixed by weekly instalments of Brideshead Revisited. Dangerously in love, & lonely, Stephen sets himself up for a vertiginous fall that will forever change his life. As beautiful as it is intense, The Long Room is the dazzling new novel from an award-winning writer. With her mastery of the perfect detail, Francesca Kay explores a mind under pressure & the compelling power of imagination. ...

In “ The Long Shadow” the critically acclaimed author David Reynolds explores the true impact of World War I on the rest of the 20th century & demonstrates that Britain, more than perhaps any other nation, is still struggling to comprehend the 1914-1918 conflict in terms broader than individual personal tragedies, however moving, of young men whose lives were cut off in their prime for no evident purpose. The author’s broad historical perspective sets out show that some of the Great War`s legacies were negative & pernicious but others proved transformative in a positive sense. Exploring big themes such as democracy & empire or nationalism & capitalism, & re-examining the differing impacts of the War on Britain, Ireland & the United States, the book provides an impressive overview of the war’s legacy during the rest of the 20th century. ...

In Britain we have lost touch with the Great War. Our overriding sense now is of a meaningless, futile bloodbath in the mud of Flanders -- of young men whose lives were cut off in their prime for no evident purpose. But by reducing the conflict to personal tragedies, however moving, we have lost the big picture: the history has been distilled into poetry. In The Long Shadow, critically acclaimed author David Reynolds seeks to redress the balance by exploring the true impact of 1914-18 on the 20th century. Some of the Great War`s legacies were negative & pernicious but others proved transformative in a positive sense. Exploring big themes such as democracy & empire, nationalism & capitalism & re-examining the differing impacts of the War on Britain, Ireland & the United States, The Long Shadow throws light on the whole of the last century & demonstrates that 1914-18 is a conflict that Britain, more than any other nation, is still struggling to comprehend. Stunningly broad in its historical perspective, The Long Shadow is a magisterial & seismic re-presentation of the Great War. ...

When Ingi Friedlander travels to Yearsonend in the rugged interior of South Africa to purchase a statue, its eccentric sculptor, Jonty Jack, does not want to sell
- he says it was not his creation, but simply appeared miraculously. Ingi decides to stay & try to win Jonty`s trust, but soon realises that the townspeople suspect she has come to seek a different treasure
- the legendary wagon of gold brought in by defeated Boer soldiers. Gradually she prises open the secrets of the past, secrets of greed, racism & vaulting ambition, whose key lies with the Italian POW Mario Salviati
- deaf, dumb & now blind. Watched over by a very earthy angel & long dead humans, Ingi forces a resolution with the past & faces up to her own future.


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The Earth's climate has always been in flux: glacial periods & warm ones have slowly & relentlessly alternated for millennia. But the period of global warming of the last 15, 000 years is without precedent, & it set the conditions which enabled civilization to arise. It is our 'long summer'. From the almost unimaginably hostile climate of the late Ice to the onset of ' Little Ice Age', which began in 1315 & lasted half a millennium, this book tells the remarkable story of how human history has been influenced by the planet's ever-changing climate. Confronted with such challenges as severe droughts in southwestern Asia & the ripple effects of the Medieval Warm Period, our ancestors have proved themselves to be at their most resilient & adaptable. Deploying all the resources of new climatology from the past century, from tree rings to deep cores from glaciers, Fagan provides us, for the first time, with an historical context in which to understand the unprecedented global warming of today, as we try to anticipate an uncertain climatic future. ...

Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 A noir narrative written with the intensity & power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable
- & unclassifiable
- books of recent years. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can`t return home to rural Nova Scotia, & looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity & repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles & San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but
- as those dark, classic movies made clear
- the country needed outsiders to study & dramatise its new anxieties. While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social & racial division, spiralling corruption & the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence & apparently doomed to return to it
- yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world & in himself. Watching beauty & disintegration through the lens of the film camera & the eye of the poet, Robin Robertson`s The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.




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The Long Way is Bernard Moitessier`s own incredible story of his participation in the first Golden Globe Race, a solo, non-stop circumnavigation rounding the three great Capes of Good Hope, Leeuwin, & the Horn. For seven months, the veteran seafarer battled storms, doldrums, gear-failures, knock-downs, as well as overwhelming fatigue & loneliness. Then, nearing the finish, Moitessier pulled out of the race & sailed on for another three months before ending his 37, 455-mile journey in Tahiti. Not once had he touched l&. ...

When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn`t expecting much. The Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that`s seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, & distance from her troubled past. But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer. The crew is a mishmash of species & personalities, from Sissix, the friendly reptillian pilot, to Kizzy & Jenks, the constantly sparring engineers who keep the ship running. Life on board is chaotic, but more or less peaceful
- exactly what Rosemary wants. Until the crew are offered the job of a lifetime: the chance to build a hyperspace tunnel to a distant planet. They`ll earn enough money to live comfortably for years...if they survive the long trip through war-torn interstellar space without endangering any of the fragile alliances that keep the galaxy peaceful. But Rosemary isn`t the only person on board with secrets to hide, & the crew will soon discover that space may be vast, but spaceships are very small indeed.
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There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. & there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire & the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. Real life in the country house during the 1920s & 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent & ordinary, noble & vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth & hidden behind stiff upper lips & film-star smiles. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters & diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls & unhappy heiresses & bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world. In a definitive social history which combines anecdote & narrative with scholarship, it brings the stately homes of England to life, giving readers an insight into the guilt & the gingerbread, & showing how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above & below stairs, & how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream. ...