Yet two centuries later, the Knights were suddenly arrested and accused of blasphemy, heresy and orgies, their order was abolished, and their leaders burnt at the stake. Their dramatic end shocked their contemporaries and has gripped peoples' imaginations ever since.This new book explains the whole context of Templar history, including, for the first time, the new evidence discovered by the Vatican that the Templars were not guilty of heresy. It covers the whole swathe of Templar history, from its origins in the mysteries of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem through to the nineteenth century development of the Freemasons.The book also features a guide to Templar castles and sites, and coverage of the Templars in books, movies and popular culture, from Indiana Jones to the Xbox360 game Assassin's Creed.

    It was in this time of crisis that the modern kingdoms of Britain were born. In their responses to the Viking threat, these kingdoms forged their identities as hybrid cultures: vibrant and entrepreneurial peoples adapting to instability and opportunity. Traditionally, AElfred the Great is cast as the central player in the story of Viking Age Britain. But Max Adams, while stressing the genius of AElfred as war leader, law-giver, and forger of the English nation, has a more nuanced and variegated narrative to relate. The Britain encountered by the Scandinavians of the ninth and tenth centuries was one of regional diversity and self-conscious cultural identities: of Picts, Dal Riatans and Strathclyde Britons; of Bernicians and Deirans, East Anglians, Mercians and West Saxons.

    Uncover their mesmerizing, realistic stories of combat, courage, and distress in readable and balanced stories told from the front lines.Witness the creation of new technologies of destruction: tanks, planes, and submarines; machine guns and field artillery; poison gas and chemical warfare. It introduced U-boat packs and strategic bombing, unrestricted war on civilians and mistreatment of prisoners.World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world. In its wake, empires toppled, monarchies fell, and whole populations lost their national identities.If you like gripping, authentic accounts of life and combat during WWI, then you won't want to miss WWI: Tales from the Trenches.

     The ship was called “magnificent”, consuming as much as one hundred forty tons of coal every day even if it just stands still on the dock, and standing seven stories tall from dock to bridge. She was considered by engineers and shipbuilders as one of the finest examples of man’s ingenuity and creativity. In addition, out of all the ships that were converted for use in the war, the Lusitania was the only one that was exempted and continued on as a cruise ship. However, its job of carrying passengers across the Atlantic Ocean was not the thing that made her famous today. Read more.... Download your copy today! for a limited time discount of only $2.99! Available on PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. © 2015 All Rights Reserved by Unlimited Press Works, LLC

    The first covered the insanity, and the second, the result. At the request of his daughters, Charles Hensler set out to write a brief summary of his time in Vietnam. The project evolved into a cathartic journey, resulting in a compelling, heartfelt memoir. Weaving threads of the events back home throughout his personal story, Hensler skillfully sets a scene integral to understanding how he and his compatriots felt in Vietnam in 1968, a year of transition. A year many Americans turned their backs on the war, and in a way, on those who fought in it. Hensler tells his story in a relatable way, creating a memoir with broad appeal. He held several occupations, giving an opportunity to understand many aspects of the war through his eyes. Through these varied roles, he was able to connect with locals on a different level than most troops. His recollection of these unlikely friendships is sincere and real. Hensler deftly paints scenes, some bloody and some beautiful. He reveals conflicted feelings about being in Vietnam, and how his experiences there affected him for years after his tour finished. He tells it all in a conversational tone, reminding us throughout of the personal nature of the project— explaining to his daughters a part of their father they never knew. Hensler’s memoir, in his words, was a journey retaken and in some ways, finally completed.

    Culley does an artful job of piecing together a story line that parallels what is known. Strong writing of the characters and a good dose of action and intrigue make a worthy read. H A Culley has long been a favourite of mine and this book does not disappoint. Really enjoyed this series. The books skip along at a good pace. The characters both real and fictional are brought to life in medieval Britain. ABOUT THE BOOK This novel follows on from H A Culley's successful series about the Anglo-Saxon Kings of Northumbria Many will have heard of Bernard Cornwall’s hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, but what of the real Uhtred? He was an Anglo-Saxon noble of the tenth and eleventh century who became Earl of Northumbria. This novel is based on Uhtred’s life. In the late tenth century Northumbria was surrounded by potential enemies: the Scots to the North, the Danes in the South of the region and Viking raiders from across the North Sea. Uhtred, the elder son of the Earl of Bernicia, fights and wins his first battle against a horde of Norsemen when he is fourteen and continues to face external enemies throughout his life. However, he has to contend with enemies within his own family as well. His father is jealous of his success and disowns him and his younger brother wants him dead so that he can succeed to the earldom. He survives several attempts on his life but then the Scots invade and besiege Durham, where Uhtred has left his wife and child believing it to be a place of safety. He must unite the disparate parts of Northumbria under his leadership if he is to stand any chance of defeating the Scots invaders and so save his family. Meanwhile, across the sea Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark and Norway, and his son Cnut make plans to invade Northumbria as a prelude to seizing the English throne.

    It recounts the epic voyages that took them across the Atlantic to the icy fjords of Greenland and to North America over four centuries before Columbus and east to the great rivers of Russia and the riches of the Byzantine empire.One summer’s day in 793, death arrived from the sea. The raiders who sacked the island monastery of Lindisfarne were the first Vikings, sea-borne attackers who brought two centuries of terror to northern Europe. Before long the sight of their dragon-prowed longships and the very name of Viking gave rise to fear and dread, so much so that monks were reputed to pray each night for delivery from ‘the Northmen’s Fury’. Yet for all their reputation as bloodthirsty warriors, the Vikings possessed a sophisticated culture that produced art of great beauty, literature of abiding power and kingdoms of surprising endurance. The Northmen’s Fury describes how and why a region at the edge of Europe came to dominate and to terrorise much of the rest of the continent for nearly three centuries and how, in the end, the coming of Christianity and the growing power of kings tempered the Viking ferocity and stemmed the tide of raids. It relates the astonishing achievement of the Vikings in forging far-flung empires whose sinews were the sea and whose arteries were not roads but maritime trading routes. The blood of the Vikings runs in millions of veins in Europe and the Americas and the tale of their conquests, explorations and achievements continues to inspire people around the world.

    The medieval Norsemen may be best remembered as monk murderers and village pillagers, but this is far from the whole story. Throughout the Middle Ages, long-shipstransported hairy northern voyagers far and wide, where they not only raided but also traded, explored and settled new lands, encountered unfamiliar races, and embarked on pilgrimages and crusades.The Norsemen travelled to all corners of the medieval world and beyond; north to the wastelands of arctic Scandinavia, south to the politically turbulent heartlands of medieval Christendom, west across the wild seas to Greenland and the fringes of the North American continent, and east down theRussian waterways trading silver, skins, and slaves. Beyond the Northlands explores this world through the stories that the Vikings told about themselves in their sagas.But the depiction of the Viking world in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas goes far beyond historical facts. What emerges from these tales is a mixture of realism and fantasy, quasi-historical adventures, and exotic wonder-tales that rocket far beyond the horizon of reality. On the crackling brown pagesof saga manuscripts, trolls, dragons, and outlandish tribes jostle for position with explorers, traders, and kings.To explore the sagas and the world that produced them, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough now takes her own trip through the dramatic landscapes that they describe. Along the way, she illuminates the rich but often confusing saga accounts with a range of other evidence: archaeological finds, rune-stones, medieval world maps, encyclopaedic manuscripts, and texts from as far away as Byzantium and Baghdad. As her journey across the Old Norse world shows, by situating the sagas against the revealing background of this other evidence, we can begin at least to understand just how the world wasexperienced, remembered, and imagined by this unique culture from the outermost edge of Europe so many centuries ago.

    By Royal Appointment is a fictionalised account of their story, based on true events. In the years following the Great Famine of the 1840’s, Queen Victoria has become deeply unpopular in Ireland. In 1861, as an official visit from the monarch is planned to win over her Irish subjects, her son Bertie is dispatched to County Kildare for military training as part of the charm offensive. Bertie has undergone a life of duty, protocol and a harsh educational regime. As a frantic search is under way to find him a suitable princess to marry, he relishes the prospect of freedom from court life in Ireland. There, he is quickly introduced to a life of decadence and soon presented to the notorious actress Nellie Cliffden. Nellie is as famous for her shocking behaviour as her beauty. A famine orphan who has climbed the ladder of society by any means she could, even she is shocked to find herself in the company of the Prince of Wales. When Bertie and Nellie fall in love, the royal family is engulfed in a scandal threatening the future of the monarchy and Nellie becomes a pawn in a dangerous world of power, politics and blackmail.

    Navy SEAL is a collection of true events about the author's time in U.S. Navy SEAL Teams and how SEALs use their humor to cope with all sorts of tragic events that they experience in their professional careers. This book offers the reader a personal glimpse into the minds of America's most elite warriors. The stories explain how SEALs bond with each other to become brothers-in-arms through their difficult training and tactical missions. This book also explains why SEALs use extreme humor, on themselves and others, in order to cope with a job that places these professional warriors face to face with death on almost a daily basis There are are those who say that it is not logical to run into the face of danger, perhaps that explains why most people think that SEALs are crazy. We prefer to look danger in the eye and not run from it, perhaps this also explains why there are not so many of us. When The Bullet Hits Your Funny Bone takes the reader on an emotional roller-coaster ride of tragedy and laughter, giving the reader a complete inner circle view into the professional and personal lives of America's most elite warriors.

    An essential book for readers of Peter Hart, Tim Cook and Nick Lloyd.The men of the 46th Canadian Infantry Battalion were some of the most effective shock troops of the Allied forces in the Great War. They drove back German forces wherever they met and refused ever to surrender. Such tactics struck fear in their enemies, yet, it came at a tremendous cost. Of the 5374 officers and men who passed through the unit, a total of 4917, or 91 per cent, were either killed or wounded.J.L. McWilliams and R. James Steel chart the history of this battalion from when it was formed on 7th November 1914 through all of its major battles, including the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, the Hundred Days Offensive and breaking through the Hindenburg Line, to when it was finally disbanded at the end of the war. Rather than focus simply on the grand strategies of generals, McWilliams and Steel use numerous personal accounts, both written at the time and afterwards, to depict what life was like for the regular soldier of the 46th Battalion during these treacherous years spent in muddy trenches in France and Belgium.

    But Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East - then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire. In an astonishing blitz of thirty years, a handful of visionary and utterly ruthless empire builders, with few resources but breathtaking ambition, attempted to seize the Indian Ocean, destroy Islam and take control of world trade.Told with Roger Crowley's customary skill and verve, this is narrative history at its most vivid - an epic tale of navigation, trade and technology, money and religious zealotry, political diplomacy and espionage, sea battles and shipwrecks, endurance, courage and terrifying brutality. Drawing on extensive first-hand accounts, it brings to life the exploits of an extraordinary band of conquerors - men such as Afonso de Albuquerque, the first European since Alexander the Great to found an Asian empire - who set in motion five hundred years of European colonisation and unleashed the forces of globalisation.

    Now, more than thirty years later, he tells the story of how his own government failed him...For give hellish years, American soldier Frank Anton was held as a POW in Vietnam. Subject to disease, starvation, and physical and psychological torture, Anton and his fellow prisoners held out hope that the U.S. government would find and rescue them.When he was finally freed in 1973, Anton returned to the United States bruised and battered. And the most devastating blow of all had yet to even be struck. Upon his release, Anton and debriefed by the government and saw both aerial photographs of the prison camps where he was held and a close-us picture of himself walking the grueling Ho Chi Minh Trail. The government had known all along where and when Anton and his fellow soldiers were being held--and made no attempt to rescue them.now, in this harrowing first-person account and shocking expose, Frank Anton recounts his years as a POW and the aftermath--devoting his life to understanding why and how his own government left him and others to suffer and possibly die in the Vietnamese prison camps. And the answers he's uncovered will forever astound and disturb you.With eight pages of dramatic photosA main selection of the Military Book Club

    Instead, he argues that it is better described as "ages of dawn," for it is in this rich and confused period that the complex and creative interaction of the Roman empire, the Christian Church, the classical tradition, and barbarous societies provided the foundation for a vital, unified European culture.In an age of fragmentation and the emergence of new nationalist forces, Dawson argued that if "our civilization is to survive, it is essential that it should develop a common European consciousness and sense of historic and organic unity." But he was clear that this unity required sources deeper and more complex than the political and economic movements on which so many had come to depend, and he insisted, prophetically, that Europe would need to recover its Christian roots if it was to survive.Glenn Olsen has noted that Dawson’s point "was that the spread and history of Christianity had provided the narrative which had formed Europe and taken out of this narrative, Europe could hardly be spoken of as existing." In a time of cultural and political ambiguity, "The Making of Europe" is an indispensable work for understanding not only the rich sources but also the contemporary implications of the very idea of Europe.

    Good addition to other books on this subject. I enjoyed it very much.' UK Reviewer.Stefan Maczka’s father, (also Stefan), was a cavalry officer who fought victoriously in possibly the last and greatest cavalry battle of the preceding one hundred years, the ‘Miracle of the Vistula’. It was the final victory in the Russian/Polish War of 1920. He was one of nine thousand former soldiers rewarded with a plot of land in the reclaimed borderlands. Stalin never forgot that humiliating defeat.Stefan B. was born in 1922 just over two years later.Life was hard in those early years; the military settlers had to defend their borders against invasion by armed bands from Russia, crossing into Poland from the east.By 1937, the rewards of hard work were paying off, and life was beginning to get easier... Then came the war, and Stalin’s revenge on the military settlers he so bitterly despised for their victory over Soviet forces twenty years earlier. Rounded up, they were uprooted from their homes, put on cattle trucks, and forcibly deported to the frozen and inhospitable wastes of Siberia.Goodbye Poland is one man’s account of his journey into adversity at the age of just seventeen. Written exactly as he spoke, his accent comes through loud and clear, in this inspirational true story of stoicism, and survival against the odds.