W tym dziale znajdziecie fascynująca literaturę, która przekona was jak fascynująca i ciekawa jest historia i jak wiele możemy się nauczyć. Może zainteresujecie się wojną na Pacyfiku, o której ciekawie pisze Morison Samuel Eliot, albo może zaciekawią was powieści Adama Borowieckiego, które przedstawiają przygody w galaktykach kosmosu Junga i Ing. Zapraszamy równiez po powieści biograficzne, polityczne.
India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.
In the millennium and a half from c. 250 BC to 1200 AD, Indian art, religion, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world – a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.
Here, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the culture and technology of not only its ancient world, but of the world as we know it today.
A concise introduction to the organization, responsibilities, uniforms, and insignia of the German Police under the Nazi regime.
Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the previously decentralized provincial police system was unified into a single state apparatus, integrated at the command levels with the SS. Despite central control, the police were divided into a complex array of departments and functions, each with its own uniform distinctions.
The book explores the roles and appearances of various branches, including Police Generals, rural constables, transport policemen, and factory watchmen.
These two novellas by the inimitable Tanizaki were among his favourites.
The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi recounts the dark sexual obsessions of a sixteenth-century warlord, accidentally initiated in his youth into the morbid rites attendant upon battle. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality.
Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a very different mode. Cast in the uniquely Japanese form of the ‘essay novel’, the narrative blends the stories of two friends on an expedition into the mountains south of Kyoto, one of them following the traces of a medieval myth, the other in search of a more recent, private past.
‘After 20 years of writing novels in a fairly orthodox style, Tanizaki fused two interests - traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative – into a unique style’ New York
We all make mistakes, but rarely do they change the course of human history. From break-ups that ended empires to naps that sank ships, 10 Mistakes That Changed History is the hilarious retelling of some of the greatest episodes in the story of humankind.
Looking at many of the biggest characters and events of the last two and a half thousand years, from Cleopatra to the sinking of the Titanic, historian and comedian Paul Coulter explores how, despite the glamour, entourages and deity-sized egos, historical turning points were often the result of very human errors.
Blending history, storytelling and comedy, 10 Mistakes That Changed History is history as you wish you had learned it back at school: a greatest-hits of bad leadership decisions, misguided acts of heroism and catastrophic lapses of judgement.
These are the stories that have shaped our world, all with monumental consequences. Because sometimes it's nice to know that, no matter how bad your day is, the greatest names in history stuffed up too.
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Praise for the hit live show:
Top pick of the Edinburgh Fringe 2024, credited as one of the best shows by Scottish Herald, Mervyn Stutter and the Edinburgh Reporter.'So engaging and entertaining that forgot I was there to review it.' Theatre Weekly 'Entertaining and informative.' Edinburgh Reporter'The perfect balance between entertaining and educating.' Corr Blimey'Coulter cleverly weaves the well-researched facts with modern day parallels; turning historical figures into relatable misfits.' Glam Adelaide 'Coulter’s storytelling unmatched, and his references to current pop culture relevant and hilarious.' Edinburgh Fringe Review 'Infectiously charming.' LondonTheatre1'A hilarious blend of storytelling, facts and comedy.' On the Record
On 6 June 1944 when the Allied armies landed on D-Day, the Second World War had already lasted almost five years. Yet many of the British and American troops who invaded Normandy were virgin soldiers, never before committed to battle. They quit England in summertime to face within hours a storm of machine-gun and mortar fire. They witnessed scenes, above all of sudden death, such as no exercise had prepared them for.
In Sword, veteran chronicler of war Max Hastings explores with extraordinary vividness the actions of the Commando brigade and Montgomery’s 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions on and around a single beach. He describes their frustrations, hopes, loves and fears through the apparently interminable years training and preparing in England, then their triumphs and tragedies on the beach and beyond. Here are the airborne assaults on the Caen Canal bridge and Merville Battery, the battles on the shoreline and against the German strongpoints inland, narrated and explained with all the insights that Hastings’ decades of study, veterans’ interviews and new archive research enable him to deploy.
The book offers a searching analysis of why British troops did not reach Caen on 6 June, as Montgomery had promised Churchill that they would – and the story of the brigadier who was sacked for that failure. There is also a host of personal portraits of key figures from Commando leader Lord Lovat, famously brave but supremely arrogant, to Colonel Jim Eadie, whose tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry repulsed a panzer division in the last hours of 6 June, and some of the humbler participants to whom extraordinary things happened.
This is the story of D-Day as you have never read it before, with the blend of narrative, analysis and human insight that made Max Hastings’ last book Operation Biting, like many of his earlier works, a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller.
A century before Britain became involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, whole villages and towns in England, Ireland, Italy, Spain and other European countries were being depopulated by slavers, who transported the men, women and children to Africa where they were sold to the highest bidder. This is the forgotten slave trade.
Starting with the practice of slavery in the ancient world, Simon Webb traces the history of slavery in Europe and examines the experiences of those who were forcibly taken from their homes. He describes how thousands of European boys were castrated and then sold in Africa and the Middle East, and also explains how the role of the newly-independent United States helped to put an end to the trade in European and American slaves. He also discuss the importance of towns such as Bristol, which was an important staging-post for the transfer of English slaves to Africa over 1,000 years before it became a major centre for the slave trade in the eighteenth century.
Reading this book will forever change how you view the slave trade and show that many commonly held beliefs about this controversial subject are almost wholly inaccurate and mistaken.
The ships that dominate so much of the history of the Royal Navy in the Second World War are more often than not the carriers or battleships – Ark Royal, Warspite, Hood – and rarely do ships smaller than cruisers move centre stage. Apart that is from one class, the Tribal class destroyers, heroes of the Altmark incident, of the battle of Narvik, and countless actions across all theatres of operation. Yet there has been surprisingly little written about these critical ships, still less about their wartime successors, the Battle class, or their postwar incarnations, the Daring class.
This book seeks to rectify this by describing the three classes, each designed under different circumstances along destroyer lines but to general-purpose light cruiser form, from the interwar period through to the 1950s, and the author explains the procurement process for each class in the context of the needs and technology of the times. Taken together these classes represent the genesis of the modern general-purpose destroyer, breaking from the torpedo boat destroyer form into a self-reliant, multi-purpose combatant capable of stepping up to the cruiser’s traditional peacetime patrol missions whilst also fulfilling the picket and fighting duties of the wartime light cruiser or heavy destroyer.
This is the first work to analyse these three classes side by side, to examine their conception, their creation and their operational stories, many heroic, and provide an insight into ship design, operation and culture; and in doing so the book aims to contribute a better understanding of one of the most significant periods in the Royal Navy’s history. In its clear description of the genesis of the modern destroyer, this book will give the reader a clearer picture of its future as well. Historians, professionals and enthusiasts will all enjoy this wide-ranging and detailed study.
Until recently, it was assumed that the Nazis agitated against Chaplin from 1931 to 1933, and then again from 1938, when his plan to make The Great Dictator became public. This book demonstrates that Nazi agitation against Chaplin was in fact a constant from 1926 through the Third Reich. When The Gold Rush was released in the Weimar Republic in 1926, the Nazis began to fight Chaplin, whom they alleged to be Jewish, and attempted to expose him as an intellectual property thief whose fame had faded. In early 1935, the film The Gold Rush was explicitly banned from German theaters.
In 1936, the NSDAP Main Archives opened its own file on Chaplin, and the same year, he became entangled in the machinery of Nazi press control. German diplomats were active on a variety of international levels to create a mood against The Great Dictator. The Nazis’ dehumanizing attacks continued until 1944, when an opportunity to capitalize on the Joan Barry scandal arose. This book paints a complicated picture of how the Nazis battled Chaplin as one of their most reviled foreign artists.
World War II ended in 1945, but its effects were still being felt long after the surrender of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Shortages in food, energy, and industrial production continued to plague much of the world, especially Europe, where strained economies teetered on the verge of collapse. As millions of war-weary people across the globe struggled to build a better future, the decisions made in 1947 proved crucial in ending the wartime milieu and ushering in a new and more stable age.
This book explores a wide variety of topics ranging from U.S. politics and international relations to big band jazz music, race relations in sports, and television technology, to tell the story of a world in transition. While focusing on the experiences of less well-known individuals who are often excluded from histories of the period, the author combines information from interviews with archival and secondary sources to explain why 1947 was a pivotal year in the emergence of the contemporary world.
On 24 February 2022, the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops began. Since then, Russia's war of aggression has continued with increasing ferocity and destruction. Millions of Ukrainians have fled to neighbouring European countries. Ukraine is now a country caught between two stools: on the one hand, it is striving for rapprochement with NATO and the EU; on the other hand, good relations with Russia have also always been of fundamental importance to the country.
This is a picture book about a landscape and its country, which is going through dark times and is currently moving the whole world. Here we take a look at the beauty and the integrity of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian landscape is characterized by steppes, plateaus, lowlands and mountains. The Lemurian Lake in the south of Ukraine impresses with its pink color, as it has a higher salt content than the Dead Sea. The mountain ranges of the Carpathians in the west of Ukraine captivate with their wonderful wild beauty.
The Ukrainian steppe is part of the great Eurasian steppe, which runs through several countries of Eastern Europe and used to be the home of the Cossacks. The country is also criss-crossed by numerous river courses, with the Dnieper, Donets and Dniester rivers, which flow into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, being among the most significant.
Unparalleled scale, out-of-this-world colors and unique landscape shots from above make this book a tribute to the beauty of the Ukrainian landscape. Text in English, German and Ukrainian.
By the autumn of 1944, Hitler’s plans for the conquest of Europe were in disarray. The Führer’s much-vaunted Third Reich, facing an Allied onslaught from the east and west, was slowly collapsing.
Desperate to seize the initiative on the Western Front, Hitler, seeing himself as a beleaguered modern-day Frederick the Great, looked for some bold counterattack that could change his fortunes. Hitler’s wish had at least one clear result, for as even as early as 19 August 1944, he had instructed Alfred Jodl to consider a bold counter-stroke in the west in November. Hitler’s generals therefore set about drawing up plans for an offensive in the area of the Ardennes Forest. It was to be an attack that would enable German forces to cross the Meuse and, decisively breaking through the Allied front-line, advance on Antwerp.
Given the limitations he and his forces faced, Hitler knew he would need panzer leaders capable of a delivering a Blitzkrieg advance, perhaps one that took advantage of night-time hours. One of the German officers who was tasked with delivering this audacious victory was the battle-hardened veteran SS-Obersturmbannführer Jochen Peiper.
A Waffen SS officer and one of the most celebrated heroes of Hitler’s armies, Peiper, and the SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte as a whole, were already on his mind. A long-time adjutant of Heinrich Himmler, and completely dedicated to the Nazi cause, Peiper had fought in every major campaign of the Second World War. However, having been wounded in Normandy following the D-Day landings, Peiper, also ailing from a combination of battle fatigue and hepatitis, had been evacuated to a field hospital and then back Germany in August 1944.
It was while he was recuperating at the SS Reserve Hospital 501, overlooking Lake Tegernsee in Bavaria, that Peiper learnt of his part in the forthcoming offensive. Though his skin had a sickly ochre cast from jaundice and three years of front-line combat, too many days of coffee and cigarettes, followed by nights of fighting and frustration, and the fact that his nerves were shot, he had been selected as one of the men who would lead the Führer’s final great gamble.
Comprising some 4,800 men and 600 vehicles, including a number of the powerful Tiger II heavy tanks, Kampfgruppe Peiper played a central part in the Ardennes Offensive, or the Battle of the Bulge as it is commonly known, which was unleashed on 16 December 1944. It is a role that is explored here by Danny S. Parker, who reveals the successes, defeats and war crimes that Kampfgruppe Peiper was involved in before the Ardennes Offensive ended in failure in January 1945.
Adrian Carton de Wiart's autobiography is one of the most remarkable of military memoirs. He was the son of a Belgian barrister, Leon Constant Ghislain Carton de Wiart (1854-1915). He, himself, was intended for the law, but abandoned his studies at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1899 to serve as a trooper in the South African War.
He abandoned the law for all time on 14 September 1901 when he received a direct commission in the 4th Dragoon Guards. Carton de Wiart's extraordinary military career embraced service with the Somaliland Camel Corps (1914-15), liaison officer with Polish forces (1939), membership of the British Military Mission to Yugoslavia (1941), a period as a prisoner of war (1941-43), and three years as Churchill's representative to Chiang Kai-shek (1943-46). (Churchill was a great admirer.)
During the Great War, besides commanding the 8th Glosters, Carton de Wiart was GOC 12 Brigade (1917) and GOC 105 Brigade (April 1918). Both these command were terminated by wounds. He was wounded eight times during the war (including the loss of an eye and a hand), won the VC during the Battle of the Somme, was mentioned in despatches six times, and was the model for Brigadier Ben Ritchie Hook in the Sword of Honour trilogy of Evelyn Waugh.
In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment of War recalls the defeat of idealism; ‘that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck’.
Arrested in Cologne for remarking that the Fuhrer looked sweaty, nineteen-year-old Sanna has fled to Frankfurt. But her troubles are far from over. Her best friend Gerti has fallen for a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been blacklisted, and her own aunt could turn her in to the authorities at any moment. Darkly humorous and utterly heart rending, this gripping novel vividly captures the terror and hysteria of pre-war Nazi Germany.
With beautiful artwork by Freya Betts, this paperback edition features gorgeous sprayed edges with stencilled artwork. This is a breathtaking collectible perfect for the long-time fan or new Hunger Games reader.Mockingjay – the third book in the ground-breaking Hunger Games trilogy. Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she’s made it out of the bloody arena alive, she’s still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss’s family, not her friends, not the people of District 12.
During World War II, Allied bombing obliterated every major German and Japanese city. Before the dropping of the atomic bombs, conventional bombing had killed approximately 400,000 Germans and 330,00 Japanese, the vast majority civilians.
Two-thirds of Germans who died under the bombs did so in 1944 and 1945, and in the last year of the war cities with little military were obliterated. In Japan, American bombers destroyed all but three major Japanese cities, and the people in them, after March 1945. These raids occurred, in other words, when Allied victory was assured and when precision bombing techniques were far more advanced than they were earlier in the war.
Fire and Fury asks why.
Based on extensive archival sources, interviews with bombing survivors, airmen, and published first-hand accounts, the book looks at the bombing campaign from an avowedly human perspective – Allied, German and Japanese. It recreates the experience of living through the death of a city. It presents the complex personalities of the senior airmen, and explores why bombing campaigns that seem so excessive seventy-five years later seemed reasonable, to many, at the time. It explains why those campaigns became so murderous so late in the war. And it asks, with the full benefits of time’s fullness, whether it was all worth it.
A visceral account of the white-knuckled bombing mission carried out on Hitler’s hometown.
In April 1945, Linz was one of Nazi Germany’s most vital assets: a crucial transportation hub and communications centre, its railyards brimming with war materiel destined for the front lines. Linz was also the town Hitler claimed as home. Inevitably, it was one of the most heavily defended targets remaining in Europe.
In their unheated, unpressurized B‑24 Liberator and B‑17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers, the young men of the US Fifteenth Air Force battled elements as dangerous as anything the Germans could throw at them. When batteries of German anti‑aircraft guns did open fire, the men flew into a man‑made hell of exploding shrapnel.
Drawing on interviews with dozens of surviving World War II veterans and residents of Linz, as well as previously unpublished sources, Mike Croissant compellingly relates one of the war’s last truly untold stories – a gripping chronicle of warfare and a timeless tale of courage and terror, loss and redemption.
With a foreword by Richard Overy, author of The Bombers and the Bombed
All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. The life is that of Philip Bowman and we see his formative experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, his post-war career as a book editor in New York, his trips to the great European cities - for publishing parties in London, romantic holidays in Paris.
But despite his success, what eludes him is love. His first marriage goes bad, another fails to happen, finally he meets a woman who enthrals him before setting him on a course he could never imagine for himself.
James Salter's dazzling, seductive and haunting novel offers a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.
An extraordinary, heartwarming story about one brave cat's experiences during World War II from prize-winning author Robert Westall. Now with a brilliant new cover look.
Winner of the 1989 Smarties Prize
She made her way down the cliff, and on to the beach. At the edge of the waves, she stopped, shaking her wet paws. She knew that somewhere ahead was her person, but far, far away. She miaowed plaintively; stood staring at the moving blur of uncrossable sea.
She led the way to safety, out of the blazing hell of blitzed Coventry. People touched her for luck; feared her as an omen of disaster. Wherever she went, she changed lives . . .
From her beginning to her end she never wavered.
She was the Blitzcat.
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