Showing titles in 20th Century

A rousing tale of espionage and unsung valor, this is the captivating true story of Vera Atkins, Great Britain's spymistress from the age of 25. With her fierce intelligence, blunt manner, personal courage, and exceptional informants, Vera ran countless missions throughout the 1930s. After rising to the leadership echelon in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert intelligence agency formed by Winston Churchill, she became head of a clandestine army in World War II.

From the dark days of World War II through the Cold War, Sergey A. Kondrashev was a major player in Russia’s notorious KGB espionage apparatus. Rising through its ranks through hard work and keen understanding of how the spy and political games are played, he “handled” American and British defectors, recruited Western operatives as double agents, served as a ranking officer at the East Berlin and Vienna KGB bureaus, and tackled special assignments from the Kremlin.

Brought to you by Penguin. The powerful, heart-breaking memoir of Dita Kraus, the real-life Librarian of Auschwitz Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Here, Dita writes with...

The 20th century should make sense. It's the period of history that we know the most about, an epic geopolitical narrative that runs through World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two, the American century and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But somehow that story doesn't quite lead into the world we find ourselves in now, this bewildering 21st century, adrift in a network of constant surveillance, unsustainable competition, tsunamis of trivia and extraordinary opportunity.

Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis' codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence workers were then involved in making crucial information available to the Allied leaders and commanders who desperately needed it.

The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career - 1958 to 1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark.

Within days of the D-Day landings, the 'Das Reich' 2nd SS Panzer Division marched north through France to reinforce the front-line defenders of Hitler's Fortress Europe. Veterans of the bloodiest fighting of the Russian Front, 15,000 men with their tanks and artillery, they were hounded for every mile of their march by saboteurs of the Resistance and agents of the Allied Special Forces. Along their route they took reprisals so savage they will live forever in the chronicles of the most appalling atrocities of war.

Brought to you by Penguin. This audio edition includes an exclusive Q&A between James Holland and Al Murray. 'A thrilling blow-by-blow account' The Times In February 1944, a rag-tag collection of clerks, drivers, doctors, muleteers, and other base troops, stiffened by a few dogged Yorkshiremen...

Bestselling historian Professor Frank McDonough tackles the subject in the same way as his brilliantly reviewed and bestselling titles in this series. The penultimate title in the Hitler's Germany series, the book marks the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Nazi regime, offering the listener a sweeping narrative tackling the major characters, significant events of this horrific period of Nazi doctrine formed in their early years of the 1920s, that would evolve into full-blown genocide of a race of people by the end of World War Two.

On January 20, 1942, fifteen men arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the Wannsee in the far-western outskirts of Berlin. They came at the invitation of Reinhard Heydrich and were almost all high-ranking Nazi Party, government, and SS officials. But the beauty of the situation stood in stark contrast to the purpose of the meeting to which the fifteen had come in January 1942: the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

Frank Ledwidge offers a sweeping look at the history of air warfare, introducing the major battles, crises, and controversies where air power has taken center stage and exploring the changes in technology and air power capabilities over time. Considering whether bombing has ever been truly effective, he discusses whether wars can be won from the air and concludes by analyzing whether there is a future for manned air power, or if it is inevitable that drones will dominate 21st-century war in the air.

What did it feel like to be a woman living in Paris during the years 1939 to 1949? These were years of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation and secrets until, finally, there was renewal and retribution. Even at the darkest moments, dogs and cats might be abandoned howling on the street, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner, but glamour was ever present.

A triumph of narrative, empathy and research, as gripping in its handling of individual witnesses to the war - those doomed to struggle with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and above all the absence of millions of family members - as of the gigantic military, social, technological and economic forces that swept the conflict along. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped our country.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Paris After the Liberation by Antony Beevor, read by Sean Barrett. Antony Beevor's Paris After Liberation: 1944-1949 is a remarkable historical account of the chaos and uncertainty that followed the liberation of Paris in August, 1944 Post-liberation...

In her acclaimed 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt called David Irving, a prolific writer of books on World War II, “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.” The following year, after Lipstadt’s book was published in the United Kingdom, Irving led a...

A journalist writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, John Reed gives a gripping record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and the chance comments of bystanders, set against an idealized backcloth of the proletariat, soldiers, sailors, and peasants uniting to throw off oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate involvement and remains a classic of reporting.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Selling Hitler by Robert Harris, read by David Rintoul. Spring 1983: it seemed that one of the most startling discoveries of the century had been made, and that one of the world's most sought after documents had finally come to light - the private...

Centuries Will Not Suffice explores how different people responded to the Lithuanian Holocaust and the roles that they played. It considers the past history of the perpetrators and those who took great risks to save Jews, as well as describing the experiences of many who were caught up in the maelstrom.

In one furious week of fighting in December 1943, the First Canadian Infantry Division took Ortona, Italy, from elite German paratroopers ordered to hold the medieval port at all costs. When the battle was over, the Canadians emerged victorious despite heavy losses.

Brought to you by Penguin. The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its...