`Shimmering in the morning sun, wave upon wave of bombers, driving for London. Stepped above and behind, the serried ranks of Messerschmitts. Covering mile upon mile of sky, as far as the eye could see. It was at once magnificent and terrible. I broke hard into attack, pulling the Spitfire into a climbing, spiralling turn as I did so…`Read about the development of the Spitfire in Taking to the Skies; heroic anecdotes of the pilots in The Battle of Britain; and amazing aerial combat...

'The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love - only for their fear.'-Heinrich HimmlerThe Schutzstaffel, or SS - the brutal elite of the Nazi Party - was founded by Hitler in 1925 to be his personal bodyguard. From 1929 it was headed by Heinrich Himmler, who built its numbers up from under 300 to well over a million by 1945. The SS became the very backbone of ...

At dawn, they saw her masts on the horizon and immediately prepared for battle. They were up against a formidable foe; the Admiral Graf Spee had already sunk nine British merchant ships in the South Atlantic. Now, her modern prototype diesel engines were set at maximum power and she was heading straight for them at full speed...Read about the Royal Navy’s determined hunt for the enemy battleship Graf Spee in the South Atlantic; Germany`s lethal U Boats and the Battle of the Atlanti...

Just after 2100 hours, the mission’s leader Wing Commander Guy Gibson gave the signal. The red light went on and the Merlin engines of the thirteen Lancaster bombers roared into life. They had been in intensive training for eight weeks for the most famous bombing raid of World War II. RAF 617 squadron, the Dambusters, were finally ready to go...Read about the RAF’s daring Dambusters mission, along with the bombing and defence of London in the Battle of Britain and the merciless Bom...

Stockade Books and The Institute of Public Affairs are proud to publish Climate Change: The Facts, featuring 22 essays on the science, politics and economics of the climate change debate. Climate Change: The Facts features the world’s leading experts and commentators on climate change.Highlights of Climate Change: The Facts include:Ian Plimer draws on the geological record to dismiss the possibili...

Monster hunting is easier when you're subtle.Too bad I'm as subtle as a chainsaw.My name is Ria Miller and I'm a teenage monster hunter.Other kids my age worry about crushes and teachers. My parents and I take cases the cops won't believe and fight trolls, werewolves, and other things that would love to crush my teachers.Like our current case: something supernatural is making kids vanish from a high school for gifted students. The only way to...

Spring 1940: The Battle of the Atlantic rages. Vulnerable merchant convoys are at the mercy of German U-boats controlled by a cunning system of coded messages created by a machine called Enigma. Only one man believes that these codes can be broken - mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Alan Turing.Winston Churchill later described Turing's success in breaking the Enigma codes as the single biggest contribution to victory against Nazi Germany.Unheralded during his l...

One of internationally bestselling author Nigel Williams' best books to date, Waking Up Dead is both a screamingly funny cozy mystery and startlingly strange ghost story asking the question: What would you do if you could bear witness to your own demise?Retired bank manager George Pearmain is, apparently, dead. According to the behavior of everyone around him, it would seem that he is no more. Not only that, but his mother has also passed away too - and on...

'The sentence of this court is that you be taken from this place to whence you came, and from there to a place of lawful execution, there to be hanged by the neck till you be dead, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul'-Extract from judicial death sentence, England c.16th-20th centurySocieties throughout history have adopted many and varied methods of meting out the ultimate sanction of capital punishment to their more unruly mem...

The Germans were masters of Blitzkrieg. But in the rubble of a ruined city, the Russians knew the troops of the Third Reich were reluctant to engage in the hand-to-hand battle that victory required. The Soviet soldiers were fearless; time was blood. The Red Army commander’s tactics were brutally simple – defend the city or die...Read about the Attack by the German army on Stalingrad; the brutal Fighting in the Streets and Sewers; and the eventual Final Encirclement by the do-or-die...

Con man Max O’Brien takes a personal investigation into his own hands.Max O’Brien’s nightmare has begun again. Eleven years after the tragic disappearance of his brother, an ambassador in Central America, Max’s nephew, also a diplomat, is assassinated in New Delhi. Max is on the run from police, and this time the professional con man decides to find those responsible for the crime. Determined to track down the truth, he arrives in India just as the country is prepa...

Just sixteen minutes into D-Day and their glider had already crash-landed onto the field. Scrambling out to storm the bridge, the young British soldiers began the fight of their lives. Five miles inside enemy territory, they ran headlong into the day that shaped the twentieth century, paving the way for the invasion of Normandy. There was no going back…Read about the daring capture of Pegasus Bridge by British Airborne troops in the first hours of D-Day, along with the savage fight...