Pen and Sword

On the centenary of the Great War, there are now no longer any veterans alive of the six million men who served on the Western Front. Although this means that the Great War as a living history is to all intents and purposes over, the twenty years...

Carve Her Name With Pride is the inspiring story of the half-French Violette Szabo who was born in Paris in 1921 to an English motorcar dealer, and a French Mother. She met and married Etienne Szabo, a Captain in the French Foreign Legion in 1940....

Liz McConaghy spent a total of seventeen years flying with the RAF’s Chinook Fleet. Aged just 21, she was the youngest aircrew member to deploy to Iraq and was also the only woman on the Chinook wing for four years. In her astounding career, Liz...

As this fascinating memoir unfolds, moving backwards and forwards through time, two parallel stories emerge: one of a Second World War Spitfire ace whose flying career comes to a premature end when he’s shot down and loses an eye, the other of his...

Fighter pilots! Images of Baron Manfred von Richthofen and Eddie Rickenbacker in the Great War, Johnnie Johnson, Robert Stanford Tuck and Richard Bong in the Second World War, or Robin Olds in Vietnam, all spring to mind. Volumes have been written...

This biography draws heavily on the personal diaries of the subject, Robert Hichens (or ‘Hitch’ as he was universally known).After a brief description of his early life, time at Oxford, his motor racing achievements (including trophies at Le Mans in...

In 1968 a group of young people took over a derelict trouser factory in a rundown part of Leeds and set about producing programmes that were to define the British television world of the late 20th Century.These included the investigative documentary...

On 1 October 1939, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty and soon to be the UK’s wartime leader, described Russia as ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. The same can certainly be said of Stalin. How can this paradox of a man,...

Adolf Hitler’s Great War military experiences in no way qualified him for supreme command. Yet by July 1940, under his personal leadership the Third Reich’s armed forces had defeated Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and...

Published now for the first time in paperback, My Boy Jack is the extraordinary story of Kipling's search for his son. John Kipling was reported missing in the Battle of Loos on the Western Front in 1915. His father, Rudyard, had pulled strings to get...

Between August and October 1720, two female pirates named Anne Bonny and Mary Read terrorized the Caribbean in and around Jamaica. Despite their short career, they became two of the most notorious pirates during the height of the eighteenth-century...

The attacks of September 11, 2001, prompted the creation of a robust and deadly special operations force -- Task Force Dagger. Alan C. Mack, Callsign Razor 03, led a team of MH-47E helicopters and armed MH-60s. Their two-fold mission – Personnel...

Nursing is a complex profession steeped in tradition and history. Tried and tested ways of working have been the mainstay of how and why nurses do what they do. Completing tasks in a certain way because “Sister says so” describes the custom and...

Willi Langbein was just thirteen when the Nazis took him away from his parents under the pretense of protecting him. Their real reason was to turn him into cannon-fodder for use against Hitler’s enemies. Deployed to the collapsing Eastern Front in the...

Young Australian teacher Bruce Dowding arrived in Paris in 1938, planning only to improve his understanding of French language and culture. Secret Agent, Unsung Hero draws on decades of research to reveal, for the first time, his coming of age as a...

Josef “Sepp” Allerberger was the second most successful sniper of the German Wehrmacht and one of the few private soldiers to be honored with the award of the Knight’s Cross.An Austrian conscript, after qualifying as a machine gunner he was drafted to...

Having flown an astonishing 400 different aircraft, as a licensed Category 1 test pilot and flight test instructor for both airplanes and helicopters, Chris Taylor is arguably one of the best qualified and widely experienced test pilots working today...

The Vikings and sainthood are not concepts normally found side by side. But Norway’s King Olaf II Haraldsson (c. 995-1030) embodied both to an extraordinary degree. As a battle-eager teenager he almost single-handedly pulled down London Bridge (as in...

Jack the Ripper is the ultimate cold case. The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 have remained unsolved for over 130 years and hundreds of theories have been suggested as to the killer's identity. Despite numerous books claiming to unmask the infamous...