This is the first comprehensive history of Scotland’s air defence system during the Second World War. It explores how radar stations, Royal Observer Corps posts, and operations rooms worked together to detect and respond to incoming enemy aircraft.

Moving beyond the well-known events of the Battle of Britain, the book traces the evolution of Scotland’s air defence network throughout the war, highlighting advances in technology and tactics. For the first time, it also incorporates the role...

Slavery existed from the earliest societies and played a leading role in world history. For a long time, slavery was portrayed in history books as a fringe phenomenon.

Currently, slavery is receiving a lot of attention and it is rightly being brought out of oblivion. Those who know the history can thereby avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. The book ‘Slavery Throughout World History’ focuses on an overall overview of the phenomenon of slavery in history and it delves deeper i...

They gave us democracy, philosophy, poetry, rational science, the joke. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. But who were the ancient Greeks? And what was it that enabled them to achieve so much? This title offers a revelatory way of viewing this geographically scattered people, and more.

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. This book shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman - the Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust survivor story'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New YorkerThe Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon ...

'excellent' LSE Review of BooksChina is the world's most populous country and newest superpower, whose place on the international stage can only be understood through the lens of its modern history. The Oxford History of Modern China is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this rising power in what promises to be the 'Chinese century'. Covering the period of dramatic shifts and surprising transformations which comprise China's modern history, the book spans from the founding o...

The extraordinary adventure-filled story of how England came to own Manhattan in the seventeenth century

In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the evolution of one of the world's greatest cities. From the building of its first canals in the 1300s, through the brutal struggle for Dutch independence and its golden age as the capital of a vast empire, to its complex present in which its cherished ideals of liberalism are under siege, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually entertaining story of Amsterdam. He also weaves in his own experiences of his adopted home. In...