Michael Collins, intelligence chief of the Irish Republican Army, creates an elite squad whose role is to assassinate British agents and undercover police. The so-called 'Twelve Apostles' will create violent mayhem, culminating in the events of 'Bloody Sunday' in November 1920.Bestselling historian Tim Pat Coogan not only tells the story of Collins' squad, he also examines the remarkable intelligence network of which it formed a part, and which helped to bring the British government to the negotiating table.

    The Untold Vajpayee : The Life and Times of A Poet Politician by ULLEKH NP , 9780670088782

    As the story unfolds, the history and culture of their homeland takes on a life of its own.

    It is a comprehensive, detailed and gripping account of an unforgettable six-day drama that shook Britain -- and the wider world -- to the core. Drawing on original and unseen source material from ex-SAS soldier Rusty Firmin, the police and the British Government, GO! GO! GO! takes us to the heart of the whole operation.The assault planning and training, strategy and tactics are described in detail, and the personal stories of the gunmen revealed -- who they were, where they came from, why they did it and Saddam Hussein's direct involvement. Compelling accounts of each day of the siege from the hostages' points of view show how they dealt with captivity individually and collectively. New material explains the negotiators' tactics and their cool exterior versus their internal turmoil as negotiations reached crisis point.

    But one perspective has been missing up to this point—a 360-degree account of the day told through firsthand.Now, in The Only Plane in the Sky, Garrett Graff tells the story of the day as it was lived—in the words of those who lived it. Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, declassified documents, original interviews, and oral histories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members, he paints the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet.Beginning in the predawn hours of airports in the Northeast, we meet the ticket agents who unknowingly usher terrorists onto their flights, and the flight attendants inside the hijacked planes. In New York, first responders confront a scene of unimaginable horror at the Twin Towers. From a secret bunker under the White House, officials watch for incoming planes on radar. Aboard unarmed fighter jets in the air, pilots make a pact to fly into a hijacked airliner if necessary to bring it down. In the skies above Pennsylvania, civilians aboard United 93 make the ultimate sacrifice in their place. Then, as the day moves forward and flights are grounded nationwide, Air Force One circles the country alone, its passengers isolated and afraid.More than simply a collection of eyewitness testimonies, The Only Plane in the Sky is the historic narrative of how ordinary people grappled with extraordinary events in real time: the father and son caught on different ends of the impact zone; the firefighter searching for his wife who works at the World Trade Center; the operator of in-flight telephone calls who promises to share a passenger’s last words with his family; the beloved FDNY chaplain who bravely performs last rites for the dying, losing his own life when the Towers collapse; and the generals at the Pentagon who break down and weep when they are barred from trying to rescue their colleagues.At once a powerful tribute to the courage of everyday Americans and an essential addition to the literature of 9/11, The Only Plane in the Sky weaves together the unforgettable personal experiences of the men and women who found themselves caught at the center of an unprecedented human drama. The result is a unique, profound, and searing exploration of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives.

    Kennedy ever loved. Follow their affair in this fictional diary of the woman murdered for asking too many questions after the JFK assassination.   John F. Kennedy said he needed sex every three days or he got a headache. In the White House, he never had a headache. Kennedy met Mary Pinchot in 1935, when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. Twenty years later, when she was living in Virginia and married to Cord Meyer, a high-ranking CIA official, she was Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s next-door neighbor. In 1962, she was an artist, divorced, living in Washington—and Kennedy’s first serious romance. Mary Pinchot Meyer was more than a bedmate. She was Kennedy’s beacon light: his sole female adviser, spending mornings in the Oval Office, and, at night, discussing issues. After the 1964 election, Kennedy said, he would divorce Jackie and marry her.   After the assassination, Mary didn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and she shared that view, loudly and often, in Washington’s most elite circles. Her ex-husband urged her to be silent, but when the report of the Warren Commission was released, she was even more loudly critical. On October 10, 1964, two days before her forty-forth birthday, as she walked in Georgetown, a man shot her in the head and the heart. That night, Mary's best friend called her sister. “Mary had a diary,” she said. “Get it.”   The diary was filled with sketches, notes for paintings—and ten pages about an affair with an unnamed lover. Her sister burned it. In JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story, Jesse Kornbluth recreates the diary Mary might have written. Working from a timeline of Kennedy’s presidency and every documented account of their public relationship, he has written a high-octane thriller that tracks this secret, doomed romance—and invites readers to solve Mary’s murder.

    Drawing on personal anecdotes, meeting, off-the record conversations with Benazir Bhutto, and the emails that he exchanged with her just before her death, Amir Mir, one of Pakistan's leading investigative journalist, brings us a carefully documented reconstruction of the assassination that rocked the world.

    On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took fifty-two Americans hostage, and kept nearly all of them hostage for 444 days.In Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the hostages, the soldiers in a new special forces unit sent to free them, their radical, naïve captors, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Bowden takes us inside the hostages' cells and inside the Oval Office for meetings with President Carter and his exhausted team. We travel to international capitals where shadowy figures held clandestine negotiations, and to the deserts of Iran, where a courageous, desperate attempt to rescue the hostages exploded into tragic failure. Bowden dedicated five years to this research, including numerous trips to Iran and countless interviews with those involved on both sides.Guests of the Ayatollah is a detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.

    Nothing could stop him from one day becoming President. But instead of budget battles and health-care debates, his life as a promising politician led him to uncover secrets - dark secrets that some people in power would want to keep hidden forever. But who were they? Democrats? Terrorists? His fellow Republicans? And how far were they willing to go to knock young Schumacher off his pedestal? Sex scandals? Murder?The next political firestorm engulfing Washington, D.C. or gripping the nation could prove to be Anthony's undoing. Or his ascendance to power could shake the very foundation of the United States Government and result in the tumultuous Thunder in the Capital.

    Bush orders the invasion of Iraq.The Result: More than 4,000 American soldiers and personnel dead; estimated hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead; hundreds of billions of dollars spent; the torture of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction leave American global credibility in tatters.

    Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.In this succinct book, Tombs shows that the decision to leave the EU is historically explicable - though not made historically inevitable - by Britain's very different historical experience, especially in the twentieth century, and because of our more extensive and deeper ties outside Europe. He challenges the orthodox view that Brexit was due solely to British or English exceptionalism: in choosing to leave the EU, the British, he argues, were in many ways voting as typical Europeans.

    No word could better capture the essence of Australia...In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia’s past, from megafauna to Macquarie – the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are.Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of “felony of sock”, and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia. It recounts the misfortunes of the escaped Irish convicts who set out to walk from Sydney to China, guided only by a hand-drawn paper compass, and explains the role of the coconut in Australia’s only military coup.Our nation’s beginnings are steeped in the strange, the ridiculous and the frankly bizarre. Girt proudly reclaims these stories for all of us.Not to read it would be un-Australian.

    In an act of extraordinary courage, Sister Rachele, the Italian deputy headmistress, followed the abductors. Her journey took her to the Lord's Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, where she managed to secure the release of the majority of the girls. What happened to the remaining thirty girls and thousands of other children who have disappeared from their homes and schools in northern Uganda since the arrival of the Lord's Resistance Army? In this book journalist Els De Temmerman reconstructs the journey of two Aboke girls who managed to excape and one of the abductors, a fourteen year old boy who was part of Kony's elite troops.

    The general implication is that Irish people are a mass of contradictions, and impervious to the rational thought processes that might resolve them.

    She was Malta’s most fearless journalist until someone with money and power decided that she should be silenced forever. Her assassination was a brutal blow to anyone who cares about the truth.Their book sets out the evidence on the dirty money merchants exposed by Daphne Caruana Galizia. It is written in her honour.