A look at over 400 of the best historical movies (and some of the worst) purporting to be ‘factual’ or ‘based on actual events’; and how Hollywood has distorted, altered, manipulated, exaggerated, even falsified history under the all-encompassing premise…based on a true story…

     Were it not for the heroic efforts of the Q-ships, the naval war could have proven disastrous for the allies. Between 1914 and 1918, nearly 200 commercial vessels were transformed into armed decoy ships that lured U-boats into attacking them at close range before responding with their own deadly fire at the very last moment. From tramp steamers to sailing ships, from fishing boats to tugs, every type of ship was used in this great act of deception. The demands on the crews of these ships were immense – requiring supreme bravery, exceptional patience, a high degree of cunning and excellent seamanship. In this book, E. Keble Chatterton takes us through the story of these ships in an entertaining narrative, highlighting one of the lesser known aspects of World War One. Writing with narrative flair and a passion for the subject, Chatterton places the reader in the middle of the tense war for the Atlantic. Edward Keble Chatterton (1878-1944) was a sailor and prolific writer from Sheffield. His voyages across the English Channel, to the Netherlands, around the Mediterranean and through the French canals led to many articles and books. Joining the R.N.V.R. at the outbreak of WWI he commanded a motor launch flotilla, leaving the service in 1919 as a Lieutenant Commander. Between the wars his output included works about model ships, juvenile novels, and narrative histories of naval events; from 1939, his writing focused upon WWII.

     In 1740, George Anson and his fleet set off to harass Spanish commerce in the Pacific and attack towns on the coasts of Chile and Peru. Four years later, over half the men had died and of the seven ships which left Portsmouth only the Centurion had completed its objective of attacking Spanish possessions around the globe. Although this journey came at the cost of numerous lives and ships, the Centurion had succeeded in capturing the biggest prize of all time, the Acapulco galleon. Captain Philip Saumarez kept a daily record of the voyage around the world in his four log books, which along with a wealth of letters and documents give brilliant insight into life aboard these ships. Leo Heaps has compiled and edited these manuscripts to provide a complete chronicle of the expedition which saw men decimated by scurvy, mutinies among marooned sailors, ships battered by mountainous waves around Cape Horn and eventual glory in the capture of the gold-laden Nuestra Señora de la Covadonga. Log of the Centurion is a unique account of a daring maritime expedition across the high seas of the globe in the mid-eighteenth century. “It is a tribute to her officers that she not only captured the greatest prize at sea, but that she returned at all.” Christopher Lloyd, former Professor of History at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich “It is an absorbing tale … The merit of this book lies in its realistic evocation of the mid-18th century. We have fine descriptions of China and the delicate negotiations conducted with the Manchus for supplies and repairs. Patagonia, Juan Fernandez (Crusoe’s island), Madeira, and other exotic places are vividly described.” Regis A. Courtemanche, History: Reviews of New Books

    Universe, and the Terminator. Now he answers to "Governor." From humble beginnings in a small Austrian village, Arnold Schwarzenegger pumped himself into the greatest bodybuilder in history, the biggest movie star in the world, and a political force to be reckoned with--all with raw ambition and driving self-confidence. In Fantastic, esteemed biographer Laurence Leamer captures Arnold's amazing story as no one else could. Drawing on unprecedented interviews with Arnold, his wife Maria Shriver, and Arnold's friends, family, lovers, competitors, business partners, and political adversaries, Leamer offers a brilliant, uniquely detailed portrait of this self-made man who married a Kennedy princess and scaled the heights of America's elite. Readers will discover:· A troubled youth: growing up the son of a strict former Nazi and overcoming adversity by discovering the potential of weight training· The superhuman: the arrogant showman who revolutionized bodybuilding--and his astounding string of Mr. Olympia titles· Blockbuster stardom: why a heavy accent and wooden acting style couldn't keep Arnold and his publicist from marketing him into the world's largest grossing film icon · The unlikeliest Kennedy: his marriage to Maria Shriver and her role in Arnold's rise to governor of the Golden State...and more!

    This has been perpetrated by the systematic, ongoing falsification of history in much the same way as perpetrated by the powers that be in the suspiciously prophetic novel ‘1984’, by George Orwell. We have all been deceived on a monumental scale by a tiny clique of people who by their own birthright and bloodlines absolutely believe that they have the divine right to rule over us by whatever method best suits their purposes. In order to achieve this they have lied, deceived, murdered and even committed genocide down the millennia in an attempt to bring their ultimate goal to fruition. Find out about the use of drugs, vaccinations, micro-chipping, mind control, trans-humanism and 24/7 distractions such as non-stop sports, entertainments and the invasive ‘celebrity culture’ that attempts to pervade our whole lives.

    When he became leader of the Liberal Party in 1967 at the age of just thirty-seven, he seemed destined for truly great things. But as his star steadily rose so his nemesis drew ever nearer: a time-bomb in the form of Norman Scott, a homosexual wastrel and sometime male model with whom Jeremy had formed an ill-advised relationship in the early 1960s. Scott's incessant boasts about their 'affair' became increasingly embarrassing, and eventually led to a bizarre murder plot to shut him up for good. Jeremy was acquitted of involvement but his career was in ruins.Michael Bloch's magisterial biography is not just a brilliant retelling of this amazing story; ten years in the making, it is also the definitive character study of one of the most fascinating figures in post-war British politics.

    The first Indian Army officer to be promoted to the five-star rank of Field Marshal, Sam Bahadur continues to be the most admired of our Army Chiefs.

    AND TO KILL All his life Greg McPartlin wanted to be a Marine corpsman, a medic skilled at saving lives. Three months of bagging-and-tagging bodies during Vietnam s Tet Offensive took the luster off of being a Marine but not off McPartlin’s desire to serve his country. After assisting in the sea recovery of Apollo 11 the first ship to bring men to the moon the twenty-year-old McPartlin was redeployed to Vietnam as an elite Navy SEAL. Barred as a medic from the make-or-break training of BUD/S considered vital to service as a Navy SEAL, McPartlin had to show he had what it took. But McPartlin had been in country before. In a war where you partied with your buddies in Saigon one day and crawled through an enemy-infested jungle hell the next, he proved that he was not only an outstanding medic but a real Navy SEAL the toughest of the tough. Combat Corpsman is McPartlin’s often humorous—and terrifying—account of his year of combat in what had been a Viet Cong stronghold until the SEALs took control and Charlie placed bounties on the men with green faces. It is the first inside story of a Navy SEAL medic, a man who wanted to heal, not to kill, but did both to save lives. This edition is heavily illustrated with 100 historical and personal photographs from Greg McPartlin’s tour of duty in Vietnam. Editorial Reviews: I wish I could make up anything as riotously wonderful yet starkly realistic as this book. —H. Jay Riker, author of The Silent Service: Virginia Class An accurate and humorous account of an early Navy SEAL platoon in Vietnam. —Frank Thornton, the most decorated SEAL from Vietnam era You would be hard-pressed to find a more gritty, realistic, tale of the rigors of combat and the actions of a SEAL Corpsman. The action on these pages is so real you can smell the mud, feel the sweetish taste of the powder smoke in the back of your mouth, hear the fragments whiz by and the bullets snap past - and know in a small way just what it is like to be one of the best. —Kevin Dockery, author of Hunters and Shooters and The Complete History of the Navy SEALs

    I vow to you and to the leaders that you set for me, absolute allegiance until death. So help me God!”The SS Oath of Loyalty – words that became the very death sentence for millions of Jews and Germans alike. Six decades later, we still ask ourselves why and how did it happen? "The Angel of Auschwitz", a tragic epic of historical fiction, explores these inquiries through the eyes of an unlikely antagonist-turned-protagonist – the Nazi soldier."The Angel of Auschwitz" chronicles the life of Wolfgang Bremmer, an adolescent boy from the hills of Hamburg during the Nazi occupation of Germany. As a Hitler Youth, Wolfgang is captivated by the prowess of the Nazis and thrust into the ideologies of Adolf Hitler. With an adoration for the new Fűhrer and the Third Reich, Wolfgang enlists as a young man in the SS-Death’s Head Division, the gatekeepers of the regime’s most lethal concentration camp, Dachau. It is here he is introduced to Theodor Eicke’s “School of Violence” and becomes one of the most ruthless guards the SS has ever seen. After joining Hitler’s Mobile Killing Units, he participates in the invasion of Poland and the evacuation and extermination of its Jewish inhabitants. Wolfgang is the ideal Nazi warrior: vicious, ruthless, and entirely intolerant.But evil erodes even the hardest of hearts and Wolfgang grows weary in the midst of all the death and destruction. His conscience begins to return and with that a gnawing guilt for what he and his fellow Germans have done and are about to do. But with the fear of punishment for treason, Wolfgang is trapped in the cyclone of violence. That is, until he is promoted as a guard at the Reich’s most sophisticated concentration camp, Auschwitz. In the belly of such a beast as Auschwitz, Wolfgang discovers a secret that will not only save his own life and salvation, but the lives of so many prisoners as well.

    A firsthand exploration of war and the people who survive it in three of the most war-ravaged countries on earth: Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville.

    From the Arkansas governor's races through the planning of the triumphant 1996 reelection, Morris was Clinton's most valued political adviser. Now, in the wake of Clinton's million-selling memoir My Life, Morris and his wife, Eileen McGann, set the record straight with Because He Could, a frank and perceptive deconstruction of the story Clinton tells -- and the many more revealing stories he leaves untold.With the same keen insight they brought to Hillary Clinton's life in their recent bestseller Rewriting History, Morris and McGann uncover the hidden sides of the complicated and sometimes dysfunctional former president. Whereas Hillary is anxious to mask who she really is, they show, Bill Clinton inadvertently reveals himself at every turn -- as both brilliant and undisciplined, charming yet often filled with rage, willing to take wild risks in his personal life but deeply reluctant to use the military to protect our national security. The Bill Clinton who emerges is familiar -- reflexively blaming every problem on right-wing persecutors or naïve advisers -- but also surprising: passive, reactive, working desperately to solve a laundry list of social problems yet never truly grasping the real thrust of his own presidency. And while he courted danger in his personal life, the authors argue that Clinton's downfall has far less to do with his private demons than with his fear of the one person who controlled his future: his own first lady.Sharp and stylishly written, full of revealing insider anecdotes, Because He Could is a fresh and probing portrait of one of the most fascinating, and polarizing, figures of our time.

     Make no mistake about it, it was a war targeting the insidious nature of the mob and their detrimental effect on Rhode Island and throughout New England. Indeed, the book reveals the extensive nature of Organized Crime throughout the United States. From the opening moments detailing a mob enforcer’s near death in a hail of gunfire to the potentially deadly confrontation between then Detective Brendan Doherty and a notorious mob associate, Gerard Ouimette, this book puts you right there in the middle. Most books on the mob tell a sanitized story of guys who relished their time as mobsters. As Nicholas Pileggi, author of “Wiseguys,” put it, “most mob books are the egomaniacal ravings of an illiterate hood masquerading as a benevolent godfather.” This is not that kind of book. This is the story of the good guys. It’s just the way it was.

    Governor Bill Clinton’s Arkansas state police provided security for the drug drops. For assisting the CIA, the Clinton Crime Family was awarded the White House. The #clintonbodycount continues to this day, with the deceased including Jeffrey Epstein. This book features harrowing true stories that reveal the insanity of the drug war. A mother receives the worst news about her son. A journalist gets a tip that endangers his life. An unemployed man becomes California’s biggest crack dealer. A DEA agent in Mexico is sacrificed for going after the big players. The lives of Linda Ives, Gary Webb, Freeway Rick Ross and Kiki Camarena are shattered by brutal experiences. Not all of them will survive.

    He is the founder of Infosys, a global software consulting company which he started with six other professionals and a seed capital of Rs. 10,000 in 1981. Not only did NRNM lead it to become a top ranking Information Technology company in the world, he also showed that it is possible to do business ethically and achieve success without bending any laws or making compromises.This book takes you through the fascinating journey of a seventeen year old who had to sacrifice his entry into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology because his father did not have money to pay his fees, and who ultimately came up in life to head a global Information Technology company. NRN Murthy had no money, no family backing, but just a quiet gritty determination, and faith in what he believed was the future of business. The one constant factor throughout his life journey has been the adherence to the values he imbibed from his family, which he has personally and professionally lived by-hard work, fairness, decency, honesty, transparency, striving for excellence and belief in meritocracy. It is on the bedrock of these values that Infosys continues to stand firm and prosper despite the fact that NRN stepped down as CEO in 2002.Iconic leader, living legend, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time-NRN is all this and more. A man who set new standards of business growth and corporate governance. Written by Ritu Singh, the author of President Pratibha Patil, this book will surely inspire all the readers.

     Theo Aronson's The Kaisers is the story of six people whose bitter differences were a microcosm of, and greatly influenced, a national conflict which echoed all round the world. Kaiser Wilhelm I, born 1797, King of Prussia 1861, proclaimed Emperor of all Germany 1871, died only in 1888 an autocratic, militaristic man of the eighteenth century completely opposed to the liberalizing ideas which swept Europe in his lifetime. In contrast his Empress, Augusta, was progressive in thought, open-minded in outlook, yet with all had a taste for the theatrical and pageantry of her royal status. The best of her was seen in their son, Kaiser Frederick III, who was Crown Prince for all but the last few cancer-torn weeks of his life. He personified the best of European liberalism of the nineteenth century. In this he was supported—many said unduly influenced by his energetic and vivacious English wife Victoria, Queen Victoria's eldest and 'Dearest Child', who brought to the marriage the enlightened ideals and hopes of her shrewd, practical mother and her far-seeing father, the Prince Consort. The tragedy, the tempting speculation of Germany's history, is that this couple reigned for only three months before Frederick III's death brought their son to the throne. Kaiser Wilhelm II, 'Kaiser Bill' of the first World War, was again the antithesis of everything his parents stood for. Queen Victoria's hopes that her grandson might be 'wise, sensible, courageous — liberal-minded — good and pure', could hardly have been more misplaced. The sixth, the dominating figure in the Hohenzollern story, is Prince Otto von Bismarck, the ruthless 'Iron Chancellor', virtual dictator of Germany for nearly thirty years. He served all three Kaisers, claiming with justification that on his shoulders he had carried the first to the Imperial throne—where he manipulated him to his will despite the hatred and manoeuvrings of the Empress Augusta. He feared the reign of the short-lived second Kaiser and feared more perhaps (and never missed an opportunity to disparage) the Empress Victoria and the constant, commonsense influence from England of her mother. (`That', he said ruefully after their one meeting, 'was a woman ! One could do business with her ! ') Their son he flattered, siding with him against his parents, and in so doing brought about his own downfall, when the vainglorious young man he had schooled as Crown Prince came as Kaiser to believe that he could do without his mentor. But for Europe it was too late, and the policies of one and the vanities of the other were already leading Europe helter-skelter into the holocaust of 'the Kaiser's War'. Theo Aronson's gifts as a writer have deservedly brought him high regard as a chronicler of the complex histories of Europe's great ruling Houses. Rarely have his talents been better employed than in this study of the comet-like rise and fall of the House of Hohenzollern, the House of the Kaisers of Germany. It is a story of bitter, almost continual conflict, yet even in what can now be seen as a path to inevitable destruction Mr. Aronson finds passages of light and shade that show the Hohenzollerns not simply as Wagnerian puppets posturing on a vast European stage, but people deserving of our understanding and compassion.