In the long hot Roman Summer of AD74 Marcus Didius Falco private informer & spare-time poet gives a reading for his family & friends. Things get out of hand as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus a wealthy Greek banker & patron to a group of struggling writers who offers to publish Falcos work
- a golden opportunity that rapidly palls. A visit to the Chrysippusscriptorium implicates him in a gruesome literary murder so when Petronius Longus the over-worked vigiles enquiry chief commissions him to investigate Falco is forced to accept. Lindsey Davis twelfth novel wittily explores Roman publishing & banking taking us from the jealousies of authorship & the mire of patronage to the darker financial world where default can have fatal consequences...
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Earth hath not anything to show more fair said Wordsworth of London in 1802 & hundreds of years on the same can be still be said of Britains largest metropolis. Ode to London is a wonderful anthology of poetry celebrating Englands capital & life as a Londoner. Verses from our best-loved authors such as William Wordsworth William Blake & John Betjeman among others are accompanied by beautiful illustrations
- often taken from iconic tube posters
- of Londons famous sights green parks & Londoners in their daily lives. Epic poems celebrating Londons vast & majestic presence sit alongside Cockney ditties about pie mash & jellied eels in this new collection. Celebrating every aspect of the big smoke
- from the Houses of Parliament & the Blitz spirit through to red double-decker buses & infamous rainy English summers
- this is the perfect gift for any Londoner or visitor to the city. Other successful titles in the series include Ode to the Countryside (9781905400959) & Ode to the Sea (9781907892141).



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* Some of the best poetry ever written in celebration of the English countryside * From Shakespeare to Coleridge to Betjeman *



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A wonderful anthology of poetry celebrating the British coastline & life above & below the deep blue sea. Verses from our best-loved authors
- such as WB Yeats RL Stevenson & Rudyard Kipling
- are accompanied by beautiful illustrations of idyllic days at sea haunted shipwrecks & tempestuous storms. Sea shanties & siren's songs sit alongside the classic song from The Tempest & Coleridge's ' The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' in this beautiful anthology of the mystical world beaneth the waves.

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Nazi Germanys fall is regularly depicted through the dual images of Adolf Hitler directing the final battle for Berlin from his claustrophobic Fuhrerbunker & the subsequent Soviet victory immortalized by the flying of the Hammer & Sickle over the burnt-out Reichstag. This popular view that Germanys last battle of World War II was a deliberate yet fatalistic defense of Berlin planned & conducted by Hitler is largely a historically inaccurate depiction that fits a popularized characterization of the Third Reichs end. Germanys final battle began when Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici took command of Heeresgruppe Weichsel (Army Group Vistula) on 20 March 1945 not when the massive Soviet offensive intended to capture Berlin was launched on 16 April. Heinrici not Hitler decided that there was only one strategic course left for Germany-hold the Soviets back along the Oder Front long enough to entice the Western Allies across the Elbe River. Heinrici knew two things: the war was lost & what remained of Germany was destined for postwar Soviet occupation. His intent was that a protracted defense along the Oder Front would force General Eisenhower to order the Western Allies into the postwar Soviet Zone of Occupation outlined in the Top Secret Allied Plan known as Eclipse thereby sparing millions of Germans in the east the dismal fate of Soviet vengeance everyone knew was at h&. Berlin Heinrici ordered would not be defended. The capital of Germany would not become another Stalingrad as Heinrici told his subordinates. A decision by OKW on 23 April to defend Berlin in a final decisive battle forced Heinrici into direct conflict with his superiors over the conduct of operations along the Oder Front
- a conflict that undermined his capability to defend against the Soviets & ultimately cost Heinrici his comm&. In a companion volume to his successful & highly-regarded study of the Soviet assault on the city of Berlin Bloody Streets" author A. Stephan Hamilton describes the planning & execution of the defense of the Oder Front reconstructing it day-by-day using previously unpublished personal diaries postwar interviews Heeresgruppe Weichsels war diary & daily command phone logs. Operations of the 3. Panzer Armee 9. Armee 12. Armee & 21. Armee are covered in detail with their unit movements depicted on over 60 wartime operational maps. The narrative is supported by an extensive selection of appendices including translations of post-war narratives relating to Heeresgruppe Weichsel penned by senior German officers biographical notes on notable officers of the Heeresgruppe & highly detailed orders of battles. In addition to a number of bw photographs this study features 64 pages of operational maps reproduced in full colour."
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Can you forgive the past? It's 1963 & a young German reporter has been assigned the suicide of a holocaust survivor. The news story seems straightforward this is a tragic insight into one man's suffering. But a long hidden secret is discovered in the pages of the dead man's diary. What follows is life-&-death hunt for a notorious former concentration camp-commander a man responsible for the deaths of thousands a man as yet unpunished. ...

Odette Brailly entered the nations consciousness in the 1950s when her remarkable
- & romantic
- exploits as an SOE agent first

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I am a very ordinary woman to whom a chance was given to see human beings at their best & at their worst...I completely believe in the potential nobility of the human spirit. During some of the darkest days of the Second World War a young Frenchwoman living as a mother & housewife in England left her ordinary life to become a British agent working covertly in France to aid the Resistance. Entering a murky & deadly world of espionage & double-dealing she was betrayed to the Germans only to endure torture by the Gestapo & the hell of the infamous concentration camp of Ravensbruck. Yet she retained a compassion grace & spiritedness that mystified her captors; & living to see the liberation of Europe she kept in the direst circumstances her fundamental trust in goodness. ODETTE tells the moving & inspirational story of a woman who in her courage & her ability to hold on to hope was far from ordinary. ...

It is April 1940. Nazi Germany has invaded neutral Norway. Fleeing north from their brutal Blitzkrieg advance are three officers of the King's Guard
- men who have been entrusted by the Norwegian King with a vitally important mission. The only military force which stands between the Nazi forces & total victory are the poorly equipped undertrained squaddies of the British 148th Brigade. Among them is Sergeant Jack Tanner recently returned from the Middle East. As the British are pushed back from Lillehammer Sergeant Tanner & his patrol are left stranded in the mountains in the chaos of retreat. Trying to rejoin their unit they stumble first across Sandvold & his protectors & then a French patrol of alpine troops. Trekking through snow-clad mountains with the Germans dogging their every move Tanner is forced to try & out-fox & out-fight not only their pursuers but the best efforts of his own side. & as the Allies resistance collapses it quickly becomes clear that the small band of fugitives can rely on no-one but themselves.
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' Was this what it all meant
- utter intact separateness obscured by heat of living?' D. H. Lawrence's short stories portray complex
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