‘Thrilling … High-definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched’ SUNDAY TIMES‘This book is a triumph’ DAN SNOW9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is ...

‘Thrilling … High-definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched’ SUNDAY TIMES‘This book is a triumph’ DAN SNOW9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is ...

In this updated second edition:Carefree Deep Despair New LifeI thought country-club living at home in Long Island during college, with no job or accountability, was the perfect life. Then came a trip to Africa during the Congo revolutions in a small search and rescue plane with my pilot uncle. I faced imminent death four times, and a girl I arranged to go on the other plane died. That started a 9-year downhill spiral.Back in the States, it was ...

Politician, peacemaker, persuader: John Hume was a titan of Irish history – a tireless architect of the Good Friday Agreement who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. But who was the real John Hume? What motivated the former history teacher to reach beyond political lines? What sustained him during the bloodiest years of violence? How did he impel the IRA to end its long-running campaign? How did he convince presidents and prime min...

This book offers an extended consideration of the fairground showfront. It combines archival material, contemporary examples of fairs, and a sustained theoretical engagement with influential philosophies of surface, including recent work by Avrum Stroll and Andrew Benjamin, as well as the nineteenth century author Gottfried Semper. Semper’s work on the origin of architectural enclosure —formed from woven mats and carpets— anticipates the surface and material history of the showfront. Initi...

You have never read anything like this in your life. A truly remarkable comic debut.If you put Mel Brooks, Eddie Izzard, Spike Milligan, and Salvador Dali around a table in an enclosed room with no lights and a few cylinders of Nitrous Oxide fizzing away in the corner and asked them to write a book, they might have come up with Danny Yates Must Die. But why bother when Stephen Walker can do it unaided?It follows the adventures of sad Danny Yates on the run from the Great Os...

Nobel laureate, party leader, peacemaker, first minister and statesman – David Trimble had many roles. But what is the real story behind the man who made headlines and changed lives?In this definitive biography of Trimble's life and death, award-winning journalist Stephen Walker vividly details how a shy Belfast academic changed the political landscape of Northern Ireland.Written with the cooperation of his widow, Lady Trimble, and their grown-up children, Peacemaker

Drawing upon war diaries, court martial papers and interviews with veterans and family members, award-winning BBC journalist Stephen Walker explains how, often exhausted by battle, or suffering shell-shock, men who refused to fight were branded as cowards, and shot at dawn by a firing squad. From the cities and townlands of Ireland to the killing fields of the Western Front and Gallipoli, Forgotten Soldiers traces the lives of men who enlisted to fight an enemy but ended up being killed by...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER‘A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read’At 8:15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty-thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the city’s population died, by heat, by the blast, and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare:...

Carefree–Deep Despair–New LifeI thought country-club living at home in Long Island during college, with no job or accountability, was the perfect life. Then came a trip to Africa during the Congo revolutions in a small search and rescue plane with my pilot uncle. I faced imminent death four times, and a girl I arranged to go on the other plane died. That started a 9-year downhill spiral.Back in the States, it was one illness and surgery after another, and two more knocks on...

The ability to learn is of crucial importance in human life, but understanding this ability has proved to be difficult. There have been many attempts to formulate scientific theories based on both animal experiments and human experience; and these have been applied to education and the treatment of psychological disturbance, with a certain amount of success. Originally published in 1984, this incisive guide to the research and its outcomes provides the background to one of the most debated...

In Ireland's Call BBC journalist Stephen Walker charts the fascinating stories of 40 Irishmen who swapped the sports field for the battlefield - household names who gave up their blossoming careers to volunteer for the Great War.Using rare archive letters, memoirs and newspaper reports, this compelling book features the stories of sportsmen whose lives were tragically cut short in the mud of the Somme, the despair of Ypres and the heat of Gallipoli. It chronicles the remarkable ach...