'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph1940. An unassuming English engineer has travelled to Turkey on business. And somebody wants him dead.It all began when Graham was taken to a nightclub in Istanbul and noticed a man in a crumpled suit, watching him. Then he narrowly missed being killed by gunfire on returning to his hotel room. Now, terrified, he has been h...

A virtuoso performance by historian Norman Stone, who has lived and worked in the country since 1997, this concise survey of Turkeys relations with its immediate neighbours and the wider world from the 11th century to the present day. Stone deftly conducts the reader through this story, from the arrival of the Seljuks in Anatolia in the eleventh century to the modern republic applying for EU membership in the twenty-first. It is an historical account of epic proportions, featuring rapaciou...

This biography looks beneath the usual assessment of Adolf Hitler the monster, digging deeper into his life and examining his successes alongside his many failings. Through his meticulous research and illuminating writing, Stone reveals a man who was surprisingly human: not the clear-sighted decisive leader he seemed, but rather plagued by doubt and often uncertain about his next course of action.

The victors of the First World War created Hungary from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but, in the centuries before, many called for its creation. Norman Stone traces the country's roots from the traditional representative councils of land-owning nobles to the Magyar nationalists of the nineteenth century and the first wars of independence.Hungary's history since 1918 has not been a happy one. Economic collapse and hyperinflation in the post-war years led to fascist dict...

Spanning the origins of the Earth to the outcome of the First World War, this is a brilliantly compelling account of the evolution of life and the development of the human race. Along the way, Wells considers such diverse subjects as the Neolithic era, the rise of Judaism, the Golden Age of Athens, the life of Christ, the rise of Islam, the discovery of America and the Industrial Revolution. Breathtaking in its scope and passionate in its intensity, this history remains one of the most rea...

A pacy, compelling and penetrating account from Wolfson Prize-winning author Norman Stone, that shows World War Two in a fresh new lightThe Second World War is the nightmare that sits at the heart of the modern era - a total refutation of any notion of human progress and a conflict which still haunts us seventy years on.Norman Stone's gripping new book aims to tell the narrative of the war in as brief a compass as possible, making a sometimes familiar story...

'Do we need another history of the First World War? The answer in the case of Norman Stone's short book is, yes - because of its opinionated freshness and the unusual, sharp facts that fly about like shrapnel' Literary ReviewIn 1914 a new kind of war, and a new kind of world, came about. Fourteen million combatants died, a further twenty million were wounded, four empires were destroyed and even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. The First World Wa...

After the unprecedented destruction of the Great War, the world longed for a lasting peace. The victors, however, valued vengeance even more than stability and demanded a massive indemnity from Germany in order to keep it from rearming. The results, as eminent historian Norman Stone describes in this authoritative history, were disastrous.In World War Two, Stone provides a remarkably concise account of the deadliest war of human history, showing how the conflict roared to ...

'Without question one of the classics of post-war historical scholarship, Stone's boldly conceived and brilliantly executed book opened the eyes of a generation of young British historians raised on tales of the Western trenches to the crucial importance of the Eastern Front in the First World War' Niall Ferguson 'Scholarly, lucid, entertaining, based on a thorough knowledge of Austrian and Russian sources, it sharply revises traditional assumptions about the First World War.' Michael Howa...

Published in the year 2005, Quest for Sheba is a valuable contribution to the field of Middle Eastern Studies.

Those who survived the Second World War stared out onto a devastated, morally ruined world. Much of Europe and Asia had been so ravaged that it was unclear whether any form of normal life could ever be established again - coups, collapsing empires and civil wars, some on a vast scale, continued to reshape country after country long after the fighting was meant to have ended.Everywhere the 'Atlantic' world (the USA, Britain and a handful of allies) was on the defensive and its enemi...

Brought to you by Penguin.It is 1940 and Mr Graham, a quietly-spoken engineer and arms expert, has just finished high-level talks with the Turkish government. And now somebody wants him dead. The previous night three shots were fired at him as he stepped into his hotel room, so, terrified, he escapes in secret on a passenger steamer from Istanbul. As he journeys home - alongside, among others, an entrancing French dancer, an unkempt trader, a mysterious German doct...