Charles Upham was the most highly decorated soldier in the Commonwealth forces of WWII, and could arguably be called the bravest soldier of the war. An unassuming stock worker/ valuer at the beginning of the war, he stormed through Crete and the Western Desert amazing and confounding his comrades with his exploits. He won two Victoria Crosses (the only combat soldier ever to do so) and in the opinion of his superiors deserved many more. Captured, he became an escape artist and ended his wa...

"David Bodycombe has one of the most devious minds I've ever encountered" - Victoria Coren Mitchell, author and host of Only Connect**"The only quiz book where it’s mildly disappointing when you know an answer because you don’t get the satisfaction of working it out" - James Harkin, creator and host of No Such Thing As A FishFrom hit YouTuber Tom Scott and Only Connect question editor David Bodycombe come...

Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of...

On an Empty Stomach examines the practical techniques humanitarians have used to manage and measure starvation, from Victorian "scientific" soup kitchens to space-age, high-protein foods. Tracing the evolution of these techniques since the start of the nineteenth century, Tom Scott-Smith argues that humanitarianism is not a simple story of progress and improvement, but rather is profoundly shaped by sociopolitical conditions. Aid is often presented as an apolitical and technical p...

Over the last twenty years research on the Reformation in Germany has shifted both chronologically and thematically toward an interest in the ’long’ or ’delayed’ Reformations, and the structure and operation of the Holy Roman Empire. Whilst this focus has resulted in many fascinating new insights, it has also led to the relative neglect of the early Reformation movement. Put together with the explicit purpose of encouraging scholars to reengage with the early ’storm years’ of the German Re...

Questioning what shelter is and how we can define it, this volume brings together essays on different forms of refugee shelter, with a view to widening public understanding about the lives of forced migrants and developing theoretical understanding of this oft-neglected facet of the refugee experience. Drawing on a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, law, architecture, and history, each of the chapters describes a particular shelter and uses this to open up theoretical...

Homeland Security Agent Ben Stafford is sent to Italy by a secret CIA artificial intelligence computer program. His job there is to find a shipment of heat-seeking missiles that were smuggled into Italy from Libya on an Egyptian cargo ship, along with a missing shipping of South African nuclear reactor fuel. While bullets are flying, time is running out. He has the help of a good woman, a Guardian Angel who is also a CIA agent, and a talking cat. Does he really hear the voice of God leadin...

THE SUNDAY TIMES AND ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016'Hugely impressive... Wilson is an assured guide through the millennium-long labyrinth of papal-imperial relations' Literary ReviewA great, sprawling, ancient and unique entity, the Holy Roman Empire, from its founding by Charlemagne to its destruction by Napoleon a millennium later, formed the heart of Europe. It was a great engine for inventions and ideas, it ...

The riveting story of the Germania and its incarnations and exploitations through the ages.The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on a life of its own as both an object and an ideology. When Tacitus wrote a not-very-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98 CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as "a b...

From “one of the best of the new [Martin Luther] biographers” (The New Yorker), a portrait of the complicated founding father of the Protestant Reformation, whose intellectual assault on Catholicism transformed Christianity and changed the course of world history.“Magnificent.”—The Wall Street Journal“Penetrating.”—The New York Times Book Review“Smart, accessible, authoritative.”—Hil...

On 28 June 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg-Lorraine-Este was shot dead. Known as the moment that sparked off the First World War, this incident also initiated another, lesser-known story: the beginning of the end of Habsburg rule, which came four years later. In this comprehensive account of the longest-lived European empire, Paula Sutter Fichtner explains how the dynasty came to play such a decisive role in the fate of the continent.

In this wide-ranging work, Caspar Hirschi offers new perspectives on the origins of nationalism and the formation of European nations. Based on extensive study of written and visual sources dating from the ancient to the early modern period, the author re-integrates the history of pre-modern Europe into the study of nationalism, describing it as an unintended and unavoidable consequence of the legacy of Roman imperialism in the Middle Ages. Hirschi identifies the earliest nationalists amon...