Ants came to this planet long before man. Since then they have developed one of the most intricate civilizations imaginable
- a
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In 1945 Britain was the worlds leading designer & builder of aircraft
- a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric. &
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In 1945 Britain was the worlds leading designer & builder of aircraft
- a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric. &
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In 1945 Britain was the world's leading designer & builder of aircraft
- a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric.
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The story of our navy is nothing less than the story of Britain our culture & our empire. Much more than a parade of admirals & their battles this is the story of how an insignificant island nation conquered the world's oceans to become its greatest trading empire. Few other nations have fallen so deeply in love with a branch of the armed forces as the British did with its Navy. Yet as Ben Wilson shows there was nothing inevitable about this rise to maritime domination nor was it ever an easy path. For much of our history Britain was a third-rate maritime power on the periphery of Europe. EMPIRE OF THE DEEP also reveals how our naval history has shaped us in more subtle & surprising ways
- our language culture politics & national character all owe a great debt to this conquest of the seas. This is a gripping fresh take on our national story.
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In the Empire of the Saviours the People are forced to live in fortified towns. Their walls are guarded by an army of Heroes whose task is to keep marauding pagans out as much as it is to keep the People inside. Several times a year living Saints visit the towns to exact the Saviours tithe from all those coming of age
- a tithe often paid in blood. When a young boy Jillan unleashes pagan magicks in an accident his whole town turns against him. He goes on the run but what hope can there be when the Saviours & the entire Empire decide he must be caught? Jillan is initially hunted by just the soldiers of the Saint of his region but others soon begin to hear of his increasing power & seek to use him for their own ends. Some want Jillan to join the fight against the Empire others wish to steal his power for themselves & others still want Jillan to lead them to the Geas the source of all life & power in the world. There are very few Jillan can trust except for a ragtag group of outcasts. His parents threatened his life in tatters his beliefs shaken to the core Jillan must decide which side he is on & whether to fight or run.. .
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The year 1588 marked a turning point in our national story. Victory over the Spanish Armada transformed us into a seafaring nation & it sparked a myth that one day would become a reality
- that the nation's new destiny the source of her future wealth & power lay out on the oceans. This book tells the story of how the navy expanded from a tiny force to become the most complex industrial enterprise on earth; how the need to organise it laid the foundations of our civil service & our economy; & how it transformed our culture our sense of national identity & our democracy. Re-issued in trade paperback format Brian Lavery's narrative explores the navy's rise over four centuries; a key factor in propelling Britain to its status as the most powerful nation on earth & assesses the turning point of Jutland & the First World War. He creates a compelling read that is every bit as engaging as the TV series itself.
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In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians & white settlers for control of the American West centering on Quanah the greatest Comanche chief of them all " Empire of the Summer Moon" spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise & fall of the Comanches the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second is the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker & her mixed-blood son Quanah who became the last & greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache & Sioux it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how & when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war & so skillful with their arrows & lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico & halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker a nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped by Comanches in 1836. She grew to love her captors & became infamous as the White Squaw who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah a warrior who was never defeated & whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend. S.C. Gwynnes account of these events is meticulously researched intellectually provocative & above all thrillingly told." ...

From J.G. Ballard the master of dystopia comes his heartrending story of a British boys four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballards own childhood this is the extraordinary account of a boys life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai
- a mesmerising hypnotically compelling novel of war of starvation & survival of internment camps & death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the authors own disturbing experience of war in our time it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.
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The British Empire wrote Adam Smith has hitherto been not an empire but the project of an empire & John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise & fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire he argues was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was above all a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the white dominions; the commercial empire of the City of London; & Greater India which contributed markets manpower & military muscle. This unprecedented history charts how this intricate imperial web was first strengthened then weakened & finally severed on the rollercoaster of global economic political & geostrategic upheaval on which it rode from beginning to end. ...