This "startlingly good and vividly illuminating book" sheds new light on the Fascist sports spectacle that transfixed the world ( The Spectator).For two weeks in August 1936, Nazi Germany achieved an astonishing propaganda coup when it staged the Olympic Games in Berlin. Hiding their anti-Semitism and plans for territorial expansion, the Nazis exploited the Olympic ideal, dazzling visiting spectators and journalists alike with an image of a peaceful, toler...

Anton Rippon is a Derby boy, born and bred. He is also one of the city's best-known writers and personalities, with a string of highly acclaimed books to his name. For the past eight years, he has written a popular weekly column in the Derby Telegraph in which he takes a whimsical, often sideways, look at life in Derby, both the serious side and the frivolous. In the process he captures perfectly the essence of this sturdy Midlands city.Sometimes commenting on current events, sometimes loo...

It might have ended 80 years ago, but we still have a warm, nostalgic relationship with the Second World War, due in no small part to the love we have for the entertainment from those turbulent times.Singers like Vera Lynn – the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ – Gracie Fields, Anne Shelton, and the Andrews Sisters, bandleader Glenn Miller whose fate is still a mystery, films like Gone With The Wind, Casablanca, Mrs Miniver, In Which We Serve, Goodbye Mr ...

In December 1922, the distinguished foreign correspondent Leonard Spray warned Britain to 'keep your eye on Hitler'. The carnage of the so-called 'war to end all wars' had left 900,000 British servicemen dead, and more than 2 million suffering physical and psychological wounds, but there was hope. The vanquished had been left with no military capacity to wage another war, and with a huge debt to pay to the victors. The Treaty of Versailles had surely made it impossible for the world to eve...

On New Year's Day 1946, the people of Britain desperately wanted to look forward to a new and better life. The Second World War had ended four months earlier with the formal surrender of Imperial Japan. The war in Europe had been over for eight months. But, upon announcing to Parliament the German surrender, Winston Churchill had told the nation: "Let us not forget the toils and efforts that lie ahead." In 1946, Clement Attlee, leader of the newly elected Labour Government, underlined Chur...

Covers the final year of World War II in Europe. On the evening of Monday, 5th June 1944, the people of Britain went to bed with a sense of great events impending. They knew that any day now would come news of the battle that would forever alter the course of their lives, and the lives of their children and their grandchildren. The following day's morning newspapers and early radio news bulletins were full of the fall of Rome to the Allies, which had been announced the day before. But then...

Covers the final year of World War II in Europe.On the evening of Monday, 5th June 1944, the people of Britain went to bed with a sense of great events impending. They knew that any day now would come news of the battle that would forever alter the course of their lives, and the lives of their children and their grandchildren.The following day’s morning newspapers and early radio news bulletins were full of the fall of Rome to the Allies, which had been ann...

A history of the team as told through stories of 101 players and managers who guided it through lows and highs to success.Liverpool: The Story of a Football Club in 101 Lives tells the history of the Anfield club through the biographies of key individuals associated with the Merseysiders from their formation in the gas-lit days of Victorian Britain through to the present day.From John Houlding, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool who was the founder of the c...

A history of the Gunners told through in-depth biographies of the team's key players on and off the pitch, from its late 19th century beginnings to today.Arsenal: The Story of a Football Club in 101 Lives tells the history of the team through the biographies of key individuals associated with the club from its formation in the gas-lit days of Victorian Britain through to the present day.From David Danskin, the Scottish mechanical engineer and footbal...

This portrait of early-WWII British life "nicely weaves together anecdotes and stories of actual individuals that help illustrate the overall experience" ( The NYMAS Review).On New Year's Day 1940, the people of Britain looked back on the first four months of the Second World War with a sort of puzzled unease. Wartime life was nothing like what they'd imagined. Unlike in the First World War, there was no fighting on the Western Front. Indee...

Anton Rippon is a Derby boy through and through. He was born just before Christmas 1944, his entrance into the world hastened after his mother fell over a milk churn in the blackout. At the time of his birth, just down the road a Derby Corporation bus driver was recapturing an escaped German prisoner of war. Despite his dramatic entrance into Derby life, Anton survived to become one of the city's best-known writers and personalities with a string of books to his name and a popular weekly c...

Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Football explores some of the most bizarre football events throughout history, from its birth during the Industrial Revolution, to the major tournaments of the Beautiful Game in the 21st century. From the player sold for £10 and a box of kippers, to unusual injuries on the pitch, this book gathers some of the most curious moments of footballing history, a game that continues to be both an amazing entertainment spectacle and extraordinarily accessible...