About the series The Access to History series is the most popular & trusted series for advanced level history students offering:
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Compiled by the magazines travel experts & by the extraordinary network of international correspondents the guides are truly the insiders guide to each featured city. Both people who live there as well as the well-travelled editorial team of Wallpaper*" have put their heads together to come up with a fascinating efficient guide that keeps the hip urban traveler with his/her finger on the pulse. " The Wallpaper* City Guides" are especially useful for the weekend tourist & the business traveller. If you only have 24 hours to discover a city each guide offers an exact hour-to-hour plan of what to see eat & purchase. For those travelling for a weekend the guides even go as far as to tell you what you could see for a day-trip outside the city. " The City Guides" are being published as Wallpaper* magazine celebrates its 10th anniversary. For a decade " Wallpaper*" has been the first to uncover & present enticingly the best in new design & urban travel spots from across the globe. " The City Guides" are the perfect way to present a decade of experience in one precisely edited guide to each of the 20 new cities to be published in Fall 2007 bringing the total number of guides available to 60." ...

The dramatic & little-known story of how in the summer of 1920 Lenin came within a hairs breadth of shattering the painstakingly constructed Versailles peace settlement & spreading Bolshevism to western Europe. In 1920 the new Soviet state was a mess following a brutal civil war & the best way of ensuring its survival appeared to be to export the revolution to Germany itself economically ruined by defeat in World War I & racked by internal political dissension. Between Russia & Germany lay Poland a nation that had only just recovered its independence after more than a century of foreign oppression. But it was economically & militarily weak & its misguided offensive to liberate the Ukraine in the spring of 1920 laid it open to attack. Egged on by Trotsky Lenin launched a massive westward advance under the flamboyant Marshal Tukhachevsky. All that Great Britain & France had fought for over four years now seemed at risk. By the middle of August the Russians were only a few kilometres from Warsaw & Berlin was less than a weeks march away. Then occurred the Miracle of the Vistula: the Polish army led by Jozef Pilsudski regrouped & achieved one of the most decisive victories in military history. As a result the Versailles peace settlement survived & Lenin was forced to settle for Communism in one country. The battle for Warsaw bought Europe nearly two decades of peace & communism remained a mainly Russian phenomenon subsuming many of the autocratic & Byzantine characteristics of Russias tsarist tradition. ...

This remarkable Journal written shortly after the event describes not only the author's own experiences of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising but the wider picture. With the Soviet Army's arrival imminent the Polish Underground fighters decided to wage open warfare against the hated Nazi occupiers. This courageous decision was taken despite the Poles' chronic shortage of arms ammunition & medical support. They fully expected the Soviets to relieve them gratefully for hastening the defeat of the Germans. With cruel & calculated cynicism the Soviets halted their offensive & let the uneven match be settled without their involvement. The outcome was inevitable
- Warsaw was largely destroyed the Polish men women & children fighters crushed & the Nazis weakened. The Soviets then moved in. This journal is a unique record of the bitter fighting when neither side were prepared to give quarter.
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This latest volume maintains the impressive standards of scholarship & research from the field of warship history. This edition features a range of diverse articles including the story of the devastating Typhoon that hit the Japanese ' Fourth Fleet' in the mid-1930s the Semi-Dreadnoughts of Danton Class an overview of the Ocean Patrol Vessel type a medical history of two Jutland battlecruisers & the self-destruction & salvage of the French Fleet at Toulon in 1942. Contributors include Philippe Caresse Matthew Seligmann Hans Lengerer Conrad Waters Jon Wise Stephen Mc Laughlin Enrico Cernushi & Vincent P. O' Hara. ...

The Washington Treaty of 1922 designed to head off a potentially dangerous arms race between the major naval powers agreed to legally binding limits on the numbers & sizes of the principal warship types. In doing so it introduced a new constraint into naval architecture & sponsored many ingenious attempts to maximise the power of ships built within those restrictions. It effectively banned the construction of new battleships for a decade but threw greater emphasis on large cruisers.rn This much is broadly understood by anyone with an interest in warships but both the wider context of the treaty & the detail ramifications of its provisions are little understood. The approach of this book is novel in combining coverage of the political & strategic background of the treaty
- & the subsequent London Treaty of 1930
- with analysis of exactly how the navies of Britain the USA Japan France & Italy responded in terms of the types of warships they built & the precise characteristics of those designs. This was not just a matter of capital ships & cruisers but also influenced the development of super-destroyers & large submarines.rn Now for the first time warship enthusiasts & historians can understand fully the rationale behind much of inter-war naval procurement. The Washington Treaty was a watershed & this book provides an important insight into its full significance.

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Covering a vast sweep this well-illustrated book provides a concise exploration of pre-Classical naval warfare in the Mediterranean. Adrian Wood examines the vessels naval techniques & strategy & prominent engagements fought by the Egyptians Minoans Hittites Phoenicians & Greeks. ...

No warship name in British naval history has more battle honours than Warspite. While this book looks at the lives of all eight vessels to bear the name (between 1596 & the 1990s) it concentrates on the truly epic story of the seventh vessel a super-dreadnought battleship conceived as the ultimate answer to German naval power during the arms race that helped cause WW1. Warspite fought off the entire German fleet at Jutland survived a mutiny between the wars & then covered herself in glory in action from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean during WW2. She was the flagship of Admiral Sir John Cunningham when he mastered the Italian Navy in the Mediterranean her guns inflicting devastating damage on the enemy at Calabria in 1940 & Matapan in 1941. She narrowly avoided destruction by the Japanese carrier force that devastated Pearl Harbor. She provided crucial fire support for Allied landings in Sicily Italy Normandy & Walcheren. A lucky ship in battle she survived dive-bombers off Crete & glider bomb hits off Salerno. The Spite had a reputation for being obtuse at unexpected moments running aground & losing her steering several times; she broke free from her towropes on the way to the breakers & ending up beached at St Michaels Mount where it took a decade to dismantle her. She had fought to the end. But this is not just the story of a warship. Wherever possible the voices of those men who fought aboard her speak directly to the reader about their experiences. The Warspite is also the story of a great naval nation which constructed her as the ultimate symbol of its imperial power & then scrapped her when the sun set on that empire. Iain Ballantyne is a much published naval author. His books for Pen & Sword include Warspite London & Victory in the Famous Ships of the British Navy series as well as Strike From the Sea. He is editor of Warships International. ...

The war is over... In Bristol three very different women wait for their loved ones to return home. But Edna's fiance returns badly crippled. & Charlotte's husband comes back a very different creature to the kind gentle man she remembers. & as for Polly her GI boyfriend doesn't come back at all leaving her with a bun in the oven & a scandal in the making... Note: originally published as THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Jeannie Johnson ...

World War II affected every aspect of life on the British home front. From food rationing to air-raid shelters to war work those left at home had to make huge changes in their day-to-day lives as Britain mobilised economised & saved in the name of Victory. Wartime Britain" takes a look at what these changes actually meant for families: how families coped when parents went to fight & children were evacuated; how pets were fed during rationing; the rise in road accidents during the blackout; & the infamous 'shelter cough'." ...