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"Soldiers Great Britain Biography."
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The hard way : adapt, survive and win
Billy is inspirational and always humble. A giant of a man!' - -- Parachute Regiment awarded the MBE Angelina Jolie, Sir Michael Caine Billy is a highly-decorated veteran; with a reputation for excellence, honesty and integrity not only supporting his comrades Ant Middleton. The Hard Way details Billy's story thus far, but will also educate and enthral those wishing to seek a challenge and conquer it - the SAS way.
Tolkien and the Great War
\"Very much the best book about J.R.R. Tolkien that has yet been written.\" -- A.N. Wilson \"A highly intelligent book ... Garth displays impressive skills both as researcher and writer.\" -- Max Hastings \"It is a strange story that Garth tells, but he tells it clearly and compellingly.\" -- Tom Shippey \"Somewhere, I think, Tolkien is nodding in appreciation.\" -- Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News \"Gripping from start to finish and offers important new insights.\" - Library Journal \"A labor of love in which journalist Garth combines a newsman's nose for a good story with a scholar's scrupulous attention to detail... Brilliantly argued.\" -- Daily Mail \"Insight into how a writer turned academia into art, how deeply friendship supports and wounds us, and how the death and disillusionment that characterized World War I inspired Tolkien's lush saga.\" - Detroit Free Press \"To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 . . . by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.\" So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology into life. It shows how, after two of these brilliant young men were killed, Tolkien pursued the dream they had all shared by launching his epic of good and evil. This is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, meticulously researched and distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources. John Garth argues that the foundation of tragic
experience in the First World War is the key to Middle-earth's enduring power. Tolkien used his mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day.
eBook
John Hawkwood : an English mercenary in fourteenth-century Italy
Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute
Winner, 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute
Notorious for his cleverness and daring, John Hawkwood was the most feared mercenary in early Renaissance Italy. Born in England, Hawkwood began his career in France during the Hundred Years' War and crossed into Italy with the famed White Company in 1361. From that time until his death in 1394, Hawkwood fought throughout the peninsula as a captain of armies in times of war and as a commander of marauding bands during times of peace. He achieved international fame, and city-states constantly tried to outbid each other for his services, for which he received money, land, and, in the case of Florence, citizenship—a most unusual honor for an Englishman. When Hawkwood died, the Florentines buried him with great ceremony in their cathedral, an honor denied their greatest poet, Dante.
William Caferro's ambitious account of Hawkwood is both a biography and a study of warfare and statecraft. Caferro has mined more than twenty archives in Britain and Italy, creating an authoritative portrait of Hawkwood as an extraordinary military leader, if not always an admirable human being.
eBook
Kill switch
From surviving a horrific terrorist attack in Northern Ireland, to the violence of the Gulf War and an assault course of harrowing experiences in Iraq, Bosnia and Columbia, Major Bill Shaw had seen it all. But Bill's strength and courage was tested to its absolute limits when he was arrested for a crime he did not commit. Posted in Afghanistan after two years in Iraq, Bill was responsible for the safety of four hundred men in a full-scale danger zone in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The married father and grandfather, who had risen through the ranks to become a commander of men and an MBE, had long accepted that each day could be his last. But he never expected to find his own life at risk under a corrupt legal system. Thrown into prison and forced to share a cramped, vermin-infested cell with sixteen Afghans, among them members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Bill had no idea when, or even if, he would see his family again. This is the incredible true story of a brave soldier who survived some of the toughest war zones in the world only to face the nightmare of being wrongfully imprisoned a very long way from home. Gritty and gripping, this powerful military memoir is an eye-opening account of life on the frontline.
Book
War Memoirs 1917-1919
Bion's War Memoirs is perhaps the most exceptional piece of autobiography yet written by a psychoanalyst. The first section of the book is documentary, consisting of the entire text of the diaries which the author wrote as a young man to record his experiences on the Western Front in 1917-1919, and this volume also includes the photographs and diagrams with which he illustrated his recollections. The diaries are followed by two later essays, in which he reflects upon his wartime experiences. The author has long been renowned as one of the great psychoanalysts, his career spanning much of the twentieth century and making him one of the most influential names in the field. The author's war diary, which he kept with him during combat, covered his years fighting in France during the First World War. He was just twenty years old when he began writing it. War Memoirs constitutes the final part of the author's autobiography.
eBook
In Defence of Britain's Middle Eastern Empire
T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) described his war-time chief as \"the perfect leader\", a man who \"worked by influence rather than by loud direction. He was like water, or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through everything. It was not possible to say where Clayton was and was not, and how much really belonged to him\". This is the first biography of General Sir Gilbert Clayton (1875-1929), Britain's pre-eminent \"man-on-the-spot\" during the formative years of the modern Middle East. Serving as a soldier, administrator and diplomat in ten different Middle Eastern countries during a 33-year Middle Eastern career, Clayton is best known as the Director of British Intelligence in Cairo during the Great War (1914-16), and as the instigator and sponsor of the Arab Revolt against the Turks. Dedicated to the preservation of Britain's Middle Eastern empire, Clayton came to realize that in the transformed post-war world Britain could ill afford to control all aspects of the emerging nation-states in the region. In his work as adviser to the Egyptian government (1919-22), he advocated internal autonomy for the Egyptians, while asserting Britain's vital imperial interests in the country. As chief administrator in Palestine (1923-5), he sought to reconcile the Arabs to Britain's national home policy for the Jews, and, at the same time, to solidify Britain's position as Mandatory power. In Arabia, Clayton negotiated the first post-war treaties with the emerging power of Ibn Saud, (1925, 1927), but curtailed his designs on the British Mandates in Iraq and Transjordan. And, in Iraq, where Clayton served as High Commissioner (1929), he backed Iraq's independence within the framework of the British Empire.
eBook