Anthony Barne started his diary in August 1939 as a young, recently married captain in the Royal Dragoons stationed in Palestine. He wrote an entry for every day of the war, often with great difficulty, sometimes when dog-tired or under fire, sometimes when things looked dark and desperate, but more often in sunshine and optimism-"surrounded by good fellows who kept one cheerful and helped one through the sad and difficult times." His diary ends in...

The history of Black people in Britain is centuries long. Although integral to, and indivisible from 'British history', it is usually treated as a footnote - or forgotten altogether. But with the flourishing of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, and fierce debates around the legacies of colonialism, has come a renewed hunger for the recovery of this history. Many Struggles answers this call. Edited by one of the field's leading specialists, Hakim...

A path-breaking history of how the United States superseded Great Britain as the preeminent power in the Middle East, with urgent lessons for the present day We usually assume that Arab nationalism brought about the end of the British Empire in the Middle East--that Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab leaders led popular uprisings against colonial rule that forced the overstretched British from the region. In Lords of the Desert, historian James Barr...

Have you ever wondered about St Leonard's Forest as you pass it by on your bicycle, in your car, or on the bus? Maybe you have walked its footpaths, with or without a dog. Was it a royal forest? Who owned it? What about its dragon? Wasn't there something about a saint and the white and pink spring flowers, lily-of-the-valley? Wonder no more. This is the first in depth study of St Leonard's Forest and it is clear from reading this thoroughly researched...

This book is the first in Winston Churchill's monumental six-volume account of the struggle between the Allied Powers in Europe against Germany and the Axis during World War II. Told from the unique viewpoint of a British prime minister, it is also the story of one nation's heroic role in the fight against tyranny. Having learned a lesson at Munich they would never forget, the British refused to make peace with Hitler, defying him even after France...

Bestselling author Charlie Connelly returns with a First World War memoir of his great uncle, Edward Connelly, who was an ordinary boy sent to fight in a war the likes of which the world had never seen. But this is not just his story; it is the story of all the young forgotten soldiers who fought and bravely died for their country The Forgotten Soldier tells the story of Private Edward Connelly, aged 19, killed in the First World War a week before...

This innovative collection offers a reappraisal of gender as a category of analysis in modern Welsh history. Beginning with sex work in the eighteenth century and concluding with women's late twentieth-century anti-nuclear activism, the contributors show how gender has been constructed, represented, performed and experienced by men and women at different times and places throughout Wales's modern past. Using a variety of approaches, the collection...

A teacher in England abandons the traditional curriculum of education in dealing with a class of students rejected by other schools.

"Winner of the James Holly Hanford Award, Milton Society of America" Nicholas McDowell is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The English Radical Imagination and Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Milton. A groundbreaking biography of Milton's formative years that provides a new account of the poet's political radicalization John...

There is something strangely compelling about the waterways. Isolated places on the edge of society, they have always had their own distinctive way of life and a certain shady reputation. Ever since the earliest days, canals have attracted crime, with sinister figures lurking in the shadows and bodies found floating in the water. When a brutal murder in 1839 created a national outcry, it seemed to confirm all the worst fears about boatmen – a tough...