Richthofen spent the early days of the war as a cavalry reconnaissance officer, seeing service on the Eastern and Western Fronts, but trench warfare soon had them dismounted. Set to other tasks, he swiftly became bored and frustrated; in 1915, Richthofen transferred into the Imperial German Flying Corps. In November 1916 he claimed his greatest victory, that of the British Ace Lanoe Hawker; afterwards, Hawker’s machine-gun rested above Richthofen’s bedroom door. While a distinguished fighter pilot, Richthofen was also interested in aeroplane development, making suggestions to overcome design flaws and championing the Fokker D.VII. Though Richthofen did not survive the war, his legend and all-red aircraft still capture people’s imagination over a hundred years later. First published in 1930, Gibbons combines combat reports and press articles with personal letters and survivors’ recollections in a powerful, narrative driven account of the life of ‘The Red Knight of Germany.’ Floyd Gibbons (1887-1939) was the war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune during WWI. At the Battle of Belleau Wood he lost an eye to German gunfire while rescuing a wounded soldier; for this he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Afterwards he became chief of the paper’s foreign service, but went on to become a novelist and radio commentator after being fired. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    Four great empires - Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey - were part of the war's rubble. Far from restoring order, the diplomats who met in 1919 at Paris and Versailles plunged the world into the chaos of the twentieth century. Here, from award-winning historian Charles Mee, is the account of what happened when the three most powerful heads of state gathered to establish a new order.

    In 1914 both enlisted in the British Army - Alec goaded by his beautiful, cold mother to fight for King and Country, Jerry to learn his trade for the Irish Nationalist cause.

    One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it.In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political "reeducation" was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective.A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma's own father's story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war's end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into "normalcy" stand in many ways for his generation's experience.A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

    Sixty years later, Catherine Bailey became one of the first historians allowed inside. What she discovered when she began reading through the duke's letters was a mystery involving one of the most powerful families in British society in the turbulent days leading up to World War I. The 9th Duke, who had devoted his entire adult life to organizing and cataloging several hundred years' worth of family correspondence, had carefully erased three periods of his life from the record. But why? Filled with fascinating real-life characters, a mysterious death, family secrets, and affairs aplenty. The Secret Rooms is an enthralling, page-turning true story that reads like an Agatha Christie novel.

    It shows how the deaths of two comrades compelled Tolkien to pursue the dream they had shared, and argues that Tolkien transformed the cataclysm of his generation while many of his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment. The fruit of five years of meticulous research, this is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources.

    Beginning at the end of the Weimar Republic, Allen examines the entire period of the Nazi Revolution within a single locality.Tackling one of the 20th century's greatest dilemmas, Allen demonstrates how this dictatorship subtly surmounted democracy and how the Nazi seizure of power encroached from below. Relying upon legal records and interviews with primary sources, Allen dissects Northeim, Germany with microscopic precision to depict the transformation of a sleepy town to a Nazi stronghold. In this cogent analysis, Allen argues that Hitler rose to power primarily through democratic tactics that incited localized support rather than through violent means.Allen's detailed, analysis has indisputably become a classic. Revised on the basis of newly discovered Nazi documents, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 continues to significantly contribute to the understanding of this prominent political and moral dispute of the 1900s.

    Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.Finalist for the Pulitzer PrizeWinner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book AwardOne of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year.Table of contentsAbout the authorCopyright pageDedicationPreface & acknowledgementIntroductionPART ONE - Post-War: 1945-19531. The legacy of war2. Retribution3. The rehabilitation of Europe4. The impossible settlement5. The coming of the Cold War6. Into the whirlwind7. Culture warsCODA The end of old EuropePART TWO - Prosperity and its discontents: 1953-19718. The politics of stability9. Lost illusions10. The age of affluencePOSTSCRIPT: A Tale of two economies11. The Social Democrat moment12. The spectre of revolution13. The end of the affairPART THREE - Recessional: 1971-198914. Diminished expectations15. Politics in a new key16. A time of transition17. The new realism18. The power of the powerless19. The end of the old orderPART FOUR - After the Fall: 1989-200520. A fissile continent21. The reckoning22. The old Europe -and the new23. The varieties of Europe24. Europe as a way of lifePhoto crditsSuggestions for further readings

     One of today's premier historical novelists, Margaret George dazzles here as she tackles her most difficult subject yet: the legendary Elizabeth Tudor, queen of enigma-the Virgin Queen who had many suitors, the victor of the Armada who hated war; the gorgeously attired, jewel- bedecked woman who pinched pennies. England's greatest monarch has baffled and intrigued the world for centuries. But what was she really like? In this novel, her flame-haired, lookalike cousin, Lettice Knollys, thinks she knows all too well. Elizabeth's rival for the love of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and mother to the Earl of Essex, the mercurial nobleman who challenged Elizabeth's throne, Lettice had been intertwined with Elizabeth since childhood. This is a story of two women of fierce intellect and desire, one trying to protect her country, and throne, the other trying to regain power and position for her family and each vying to convince the reader of her own private vision of the truth about Elizabeth's character. Their gripping drama is acted out at the height of the flowering of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dudley, Raleigh, Drake-all of them swirl through these pages as they swirled through the court and on the high seas. This is a magnificent, stay-up-all-night page-turner that is George's finest and most compelling novel and one that is sure to please readers of Alison Weir, Philippa Gregory, and Hilary Mantel.

    An important and fascinating firsthand account of life with Hitler from 1942 until his death in the Berlin bunker in 1945, by the young woman who was his last secretary.

    But their days of childhood innocence and adventure are destined to be followed by the apocalypse that will overwhelm their world as they come to adulthood.For Rosie, the path ahead is full of challenges: torn between her love for two young men, her sense of duty and her will to live her life to the full, she has to navigate her way through extraordinary times. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?Louis de Bernières’ magnificent and moving novel follows the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters as the Edwardian age disintegrates into the Great War, and they strike out to seek what happiness can be salvaged from the ruins of the old world.

    At its end, it had claimed over seventeen million lives. It led to the collapse of nations, the abdication of monarchies and ended empires. Entire divisions of men perished in the pursuit of mere miles of uninhabitable wasteland –– towns were pulverized and millions displaced. It became a horrendous war of attrition, each side competing to kill as many of their foe as possible.Inside you will read about...✓ 1914 - Blood is spilled✓ 1915 - The dawn of the industrialized war✓ 1916 - Unrelenting bloodshed✓ 1917 - Revolution, revelation and catastrophe✓ 1918 - The great war at an endIt became the first industrialized war in history and introduced revolutionary technology into the fray. The airplane, the tank and the machine gun first saw action collectively during the conflict. It was also the first war in which poison gas was used to choke young men out of their trenches.This book is a timeline account of the important events that shaped the First World War. It details the events and causes that led the world to war. This book covers the milestone moments, important battles, and how the outcome changed the world forever.

    This is the story of these men – epitomised by the character of Sgt Tommy Atkins – and the women they left behind.Using previously unseen letters, diaries, memoirs and poetry from the years 1914-1918, Richard Holmes paints a moving picture of the generation that fought and died in the mud of Flanders. He follows men whose mental health was forever destroyed by shell shock, women who lost husbands and brothers in the same afternoon and those who wrote at lunchtime and died before tea.Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, this book tells the real story of trench warfare, the strength and fallibility of the human spirit, the individuals behind an epic event, and their legacy. It is an emotional and unforgettable masterpiece from one of our most important historians.

    There are ropey rhymes and sad songs, rotten rules and sinister superstitions. Here is the horror and the hardships of World War I, which lasted for four years.

    Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia’s Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France's Henri II and Catherine de Medici—all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England’s Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge...Full of the juicy gossip and bad behavior that characterized Royal Affairs, this book chronicles the love-hate marriages of the crowned heads of Europe—from the Angevins to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry—and ponders how dynasties ever survived at all.