When British Airways and Air France announced that Concorde was to be retired from service in October 2003, it signaled the end of nearly three decades of supersonic passenger flights. Concorde had flown for years without a major incident, but in July 2000 an Air France Concorde crashed near Paris, killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground. By the time the modified aircraft went back into service in November 2001, both BA and Air France faced mounting problems that eventually spelled the end for Concorde. The former British chief test pilot, Brian Trubshaw reveals the inside story of this world-famous supersonic passenger jet. Illustrated with 200 photographs and illustrations, this updated edition covers the Paris crash, Concorde's brief return to service, and its decommissioning in 2004.

Concorde

Brian Trubshaw

History Press

A 1970s Childhood

Derek Tait

Few would imagine that one man links Ridley Scott s visionary sci-fi classic Blade Runner; The Deer Hunter, that searing study of lives ruined by the Vietnam War; and The Italian Job, the much loved British caper that made an icon of Michael Caine. But Michael Deeley has worked with some of the toughest film-makers, and lived to tell the tale, in this frank and humorous rollercoaster-ride through the ways and wiles of getting great movies made.

Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies

Biographies & Memoirs

Deeley, Michael

Arts & Literature

Following on from his biography of Thomas Cromwell, John Schofield examines how the English character and the way it perceived royal rule changed between the time of Thomas Cromwell and that of his great-great-grandnephew Oliver.

Cromwell to Cromwell: Reformation to Civil War

Schofield, John

Between September 1941 and August 1943 the Red Army and the Wehrmacht fought four battles for control of Kharkov - the Soviet Union's fifth most populous city. Kharkov had been identified as a primary target by Hitler during the German Army's drive into the Eastern Ukraine in order that its industrial facilities could be harnessed to the Nazi war effort. Kharkov became the focus of ferocious battles between the combatants as they repeatedly vied for control of the city until the late summer of 1943, by which time over seventy per cent of it had been destroyed. In The Four Battles for Kharkov 1941-43, Mark Healy shows how armour and tactics evolved during the period by studying this one pivotal city, and how each battle was won. No other book has addressed each of these battles as a sequence, how the outcome of each had ramifications for the next offensive, and why the Wehrmacht - so superior in materiel - finally gave up the fight in 1943.

Four Battles of Kharkov

Mark Healy

When de Havilland proposed, in 1938, an unarmed bomber constructed almost entirely from wood, few would have thought it could become one of the most versatile aircraft of the Second World War. The Mosquito easily outran a Spitfire on its test flight and was ordered into mass production, soon proving itself a key weapon in the fight against the Luftwaffe by day and the Nachtjagd by night.

The Mosquito Story

Martin W. Bowman

In September 1939, Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Thus began the greatest armed struggle in history. Within days of the invasion, Germany was at war with France, Great Britain and much of the Commonwealth, but by the end of 1941 - by which time Japan and the United States had been plunged into war - the conflict had engulfed virtually the entire planet.  The World War II Story charts the dramatic narrative of the conflict from its first shots to its final apocalyptic end.

The World War II Story

Chris McNab

The life of Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, one half of Gilbert & Sullivan The author of "The Pirates of Penzance," "The Mikado," "HMS Pinafore," W. S. Gilbert--a witty, caustic, and disrespectful man--was one of the celebrities of the late Victorian age, and in this book his glorious, contradictory character is explored and brought vividly to life. In his time he was many things: journalist, theater critic, cartoonist, comic poet, stage director, short story writer, and dramatist. He wrote the most brilliantly inventive plays of his time, a political satire he wrote was banned by the Lord Chamberlain at the personal insistence of the Prince of Wales, and with Arthur Sullivan he wrote comic operas that defined the age. He became richer and more famous than he could have imagined, but at the price of his artistic freedom. This is the story of an angry and quarrelsome man, discontented with himself and the age he lived in, raging at life's absurdities and laughing at them.

Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan

Crowther, Andrew

In June 1940, 17,000 people fled Guernsey to England, including 5000 school children with their teachers and 500 mothers as 'helpers'. The Channel Islands were the only part of British territory that was occupied by Nazi forces during the Second World War. Most evacuees were transported to towns in Northern England and for five years they made new lives for themselves. From May 1945, the evacuees began to return home, although many decided to remain in England and wartime bonds were forged between Guernsey and Northern England that were so strong, they still exist today.

Guernsey Evacuees

History

Gillian Mawson

Europe

Indianapolis Graverobbing: A Syndicate of Death (True Crime)

Flook, Chris

Americas

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