Combat, loneliness, fatigue, fear, comradeship, women, excitement - all are built into a vigorous and authentic structure by one of the most valiant pilots of the then Royal Flying Corps.

    Sent to France with the Royal Flying Corps at just 17, and later a member of the famous 56 Squadron, Cecil Lewis was an illustrious and passionate fighter pilot of World War I, described by Bernard Shaw in 1935 as "a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet." In this vivid and spirited account the author evocatively sets his love of the skies and flying against his bitter experience of the horrors of war, as we follow his progress from France and the battlefields of the Somme, to his pioneering defense of London against deadly nighttime raids.

    He left school in 1913 to become an apprentice plumber but three years later was conscripted, serving as a machine gunner in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. Fighting in the mud and trenches during the Battle of Passchendaele, he saw a great many of his comrades die, and in one dreadful moment the shell that wounded him kill his three closest friends. In vivid detail he describes daily life in the trenches, the terror of being under intense artillery fire, and the fear of going over the top. Then, after the Armistice, the soldiers' frustration at not being quickly demobbed led to a mutiny in which Harry was soon caught up.The Second World War saw Harry in action on the home front as a fire-fighter during the bombing of Bath. He also warmly describes his friendship with American GIs preparing to go to France, and, years later, his tears when he saw their graves.Late in life Harry achieved fame, meeting the Queen and taking part in the BBC documentary The Last Tommies, finally shaking hands with a German veteran of the artillery and speaking out frankly to Prime Minister Tony Blair about the soldiers shot for cowardice in the First World War.The Last Fighting Tommy is the story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life. Please note eBook edition does not the contain the images included in original print edition.

    But how did young Winston become Churchill? What gave him the strength to take on the superior force of Nazi Germany when bombs rained on London and so many others had caved? In The Storm of War, Andrew Roberts gave us a tantalizing glimpse of Churchill the war leader. Now, at last, we have the full and definitive biography, as personally revealing as it is compulsively readable, about one of the great leaders of all time.Roberts was granted exclusive access to extensive new material: the transcripts of war cabinet meetings - the equivalent of the Nixon and JFK tapes - diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs, and detailed notes taken by the king after their bi-weekly meetings. Having read every one of Churchill's letters, including deeply personal ones that Churchill's son Randolph had previously chosen to withhold, and spoken to more than one hundred people who knew or worked with him, Roberts identifies the hidden forces fueling Churchill's drive. Churchill put his faith in the British Empire and fought as hard to preserve it as he did to defend London. Having started his career in India and South Africa, he understood better than most idealists how hard it can be to pacify reluctant people far from home.We think of Churchill as a hero of the age of mechanized warfare, but Roberts's masterwork reveals that he has as much to teach us about the challenges we face today and the fundamental values of courage, tenacity, leadership, and moral conviction.

    Andrew Carroll's portrait of General Pershing, the US Commander in Europe, is a revelation. The scope of the challenge facing Pershing in World War I, and his ultimate mastery of it, were truly remarkable. Leading a military force that on the eve of its entry into the war was downright primitive compared to the European combatants, the general surmounted enormous obstacles to command 1.5 million American soldiers to decisive victories.But Pershing himself--often misunderstood as a starchy, even wooden leader--concealed inner agony from those around him: almost two years before the US entered the war, his beloved wife and three young daughters perished in a house fire; only his six-year-old son Warren survived. Even as Pershing steered the American war effort, he wrote his son heartfelt letters from the front. Before leaving for Europe, Pershing also had a passionate romance with George Patton's sister, Anita. But once he was in France, Pershing fell madly in love with a young painter named Micheline Resco, whom he later married in secret. Woven throughout Pershing's story are the voices and experiences of an extraordinary group of American men and women, gathered from a stunning cross-section of stories and letters gathered by Carroll, from both the famous and unheralded, including Harry Truman, Ernest Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, and his youngest son Quentin. If Pershing provides the heart of this story, the chorus of these "lesser-known" voices that enfold it make the high stakes of this epic American saga piercingly real. Never before has the war's profound impact on America been conveyed with such humanity and emotional force.

    But with the birth of the railroad in the early 1830s, the way wars were fought would change forever. In Engines of War, renowned expert Christian Wolmar tells the story of that transformation, examining all the engagements in which railways played a part from the Crimean War and American Civil War through both world wars, the Korean War, and the Cold War with its mysterious missile trains. He shows that the 'iron road' not only made armies far more mobile, but also greatly increased the scale and power of available weaponry. Wars began to be fought across wider fronts and over longer timescales, with far deadlier consequences. From armored engines with their swiveling guns to track sabotage by way of dynamite, railway lines constructed across frozen Siberian lakes and a Boer war ambush involving Winston Churchill, Engines of War shows how the railways - a fantastic generator of wealth in peacetime - became a weapon of war exploited to the full by governments across the world.

    It aims to recapture the concerns, anxieties and prejudices of the statesmen of the 30s and the people they led.

    Hibberd's new biography of the Great War's greatest poet, based on more than thirty years of wide-ranging research, brings new information and reinterpretation to virtually every phase of Owen's life--carefully guarded by family and friends after his death. Although Dominic Hibberd modestly says that his book 'is not, of course, definitive, ' it is hard to see how it could be improved upon. --Times Literary Supplement

    

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    In analyzing the causes of World War I without concern for the question of guilt, the author places emphasis on two central facts: first, that when statesmen and peoples took actions they knew might lead to war, they were not envisaging the catastrophe that the war became but rather a quick and limited war; and, second, that among the many conflicts that might have led to war, the one that did was the threat to the integrity of Austria-Hungary posed by Serbia and Serb nationalism.