Historiska & politiska biografier

Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19th November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to 25 years in the Gulags. After a three month journey to Siberia in the depths of winter he escaped with six companions, realising that to stay in the camp meant almost certain death. In June 1941 they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and freedom nine months later in March 1942 after travelling on foot through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert. First published in 1956, this is one of the world's greatest true stories of adventure, survival and escape, has been the inspiration for the film The Way Back, directed by Peter Weir and starring Colin Farrell and Ed Harris.

On D-Day, Dick Winters took off with 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and prepared to parachute into German-held north France. Ground troops landing on Utah beach were relying on Easy Company to secure one of the causeways that were vital if the troops were to get off the beaches and reach the solid ground of Normandy. The plane carrying many of the commanding officers was shot down, leaving Dick Winters suddenly in command of his company. But during the drop he, and many of his men, had been separated from his equipment and was unarmed except for a trench knife.In this remarkable World War 2 memoir, Dick Winters tells the tales left untold by Stephen Ambrose in his 1992 epic Band of Brothers. Starting with an account of the gruelling training designed to make the 506th the most elite unit in the US Army, Beyond Band of Brothers is fascinating account of one man's experience of commanding Easy Company from D-Day, to the Battle of the Bulge and into Germany. Dick Winters gives real insight into leadership under the most difficult conditions - every man in the company had been injured by the time they reached Germany - and tells the real story of the Allies' final defeat of Hitler, from the point of view of someone who was really there.

A masterful new translation of Suetonius' renowned biography of the twelve Caesars, bringing to life a portrait of the first Roman emperors in stunning detailThe ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biography invites us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than that by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in AD 121. Placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius injected flesh and blood into their stories, which continue to inform how we understand the drama of power today. Their shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals are laid bare; we are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities; and we sit at their tables and enter their bedrooms, resulting in a series of biographies mediated through the lives of the Caesars themselves. That Rome lives more vividly in people's imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius, and now award-winning author and translator Tom Holland brings us even closer in a new, spellbinding translation. Giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of the Caesars and of how they inevitably informed what happened across the vast expanse of empire, The Lives of the Caesars is an astonishing, immersive experience of a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own.

***SOON TO BE A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD FILM DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER NOLAN***WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 'Reads like a thriller, gripping and terrifying' Sunday TimesPhysicist and polymath, as familiar with Hindu scriptures as he was with quantum mechanics, J. Robert Oppenheimer - director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb - was the most famous scientist of his generation. In their meticulous and riveting biography, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin reveal a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man, profoundly involved with some of the momentous events of the twentieth century.

Tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. In this title, Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.

Permanent Record is the essential and courageous memoir of Edward Snowden - the man who risked everything to expose the shocking mass surveillance used by governments across the world to spy on their own citizens.

The gripping story of an extraordinary life spent inside major disasters - from Hillsborough and 9/11 to Grenfell and Covid - from the UK's leading expert on disaster recovery.

A reissue of this classic title with a new introduction by Andrew Morton reflecting on the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the original publication, and on the long term legacy of Diana.

The moving and inspiring story of an Auschwitz survivor who shares what hes learned about gratitude, tolerance and kindness.

One of the most famous accounts of living under the Nazi regime of World War II comes from the diary of a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Today, The Diary of a Young Girl has sold over 25 million copies world-wide.It is one of the most celebrated and enduring books of the last century and it remains a deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of human spirit.Anne Frank and her family fled the horrors of Nazi occupation by hiding in the back of a warehouse in Amsterdam for two years with another family and a German dentist. Aged thirteen when she went into the secret annexe, Anne kept a diary. She movingly revealed how the eight people living under these extraordinary conditions coped with hunger, the daily threat of discovery and death and being cut off from the outside world, as well as petty misunderstandings and the unbearable strain of living like prisoners.The Diary of a Yong Girl is a timeless true story to be rediscovered by each new generation. For young readers and adults it continues to bring to life Anne's extraordinary courage and struggle throughout her ordeal.'One of the greatest books of the century' Guardian'A modern classic' The Times'Rings down the decades as the most moving testament to the persecution of innocence' Daily Mail'Astonishing and excruciating. Its gnaws at us still' New York Times Book ReviewAnne Frank was born on 12 June 1929. She died in Bergen-Belsen, three months short of her sixteenth birthday.

The inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFICThis was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands...Landing on the beach at Peleliu in 1944 as a twenty-year-old new recruit to the US Marines, Eugene Sledge can only try desperately to survive. At Peleliu and Okinawa - two of the fiercest and filthiest Pacific battles of WWII - he witnesses the dehumanising brutality displayed by both sides and the animal hatred that each soldier has for his enemy.During temporary lapses in the fighting, conditions on the islands mean that the Marines often can't wash, stay dry, dig latrines, or even find time to eat. Suffering from constant fear, fatigue, and filth, the struggle of simply living in a combat zone is utterly debilitating.Yet despite horrendous conditions Sledge finds time to keep notes that he would later turn into a book. Described as one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war, With the Old Breed tells with compassion and honesty of the cruelty, bravery and deaths of the men he fought alongside, and of his own journey from patriotic innocence to battle-scarred veteran.'Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific - the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary - into terms we mortals can grasp' Tom Hanks

Bob Woodward's second global bestseller on the Trump presidency, based on in-depth research and interviews with the president

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER'Affectionate, evocative, illuminating. A story of survival - of a flock, a landscape and a disappearing way of life. I love this book' Nigel Slater'Triumphant, a pastoral for the 21st century' Helen Davies, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'The nature publishing sensation of the year, unsentimental yet luminous' Melissa Harrison, The Times, Books of the YearSome people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. Their way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work they demand, and has been for hundreds of years. A Viking would understand the work they do: sending the sheep to the fells in the summer and making the hay; the autumn fairs where the flocks are replenished; the gruelling toil of winter when the sheep must be kept alive, and the light-headedness that comes with spring, as the lambs are born and the sheep get ready to return to the fells.