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Charles de Gaulle, saviour of France's honour in 1940 and founder of the Fifth Republic, was a man and leader of deep contradictions. A conservative and a Catholic from a monarchist family, he restored democracy on his return to France in 1944, bringing the Communists into his government. An imperialist, he oversaw the final stages of France's withdrawal from its last colonies in the 1960s. As a soldier, he spent much of his career in opposition to France's military establishment.Yet, as Julian Jackson shows, it was precisely because of these contradictions that De Gaulle was able to reconcile so many of the conflicting strands in French politics. In 1958, and in response to a coup by the French military in Algeria, De Gaulle introduced a new political system, the Fifth Republic, ushering in a period of stability that has held to the present day.

The siren-like qualities of the Sicilian capital are woven layer upon layer, each one revealing a stratum of the city's character. In Palermo, Robert Alajmo lays out a compelling series of reflections on the city's apparently endless facets. Disguised as a tourist's handbook but written from the view of a lifelong resident - with all the experience, affection, inside knowledge and frustrations that entails - Alajmo offers more than the ordinary recommendations for travellers. Palermo has been at history's crossroads since recorded time began; an archive of hidden cultural, architectural and culinary jewels. Its people, their politics and their secrets, are subtly revealed, as is the ineffable presence of the mafia in the cycles of daily life. Ultimately what is described is the essence of the city and its beauty.

In recent years, tourists have discovered the rustic charms of Puglia, also known as Apulia, the heel stretching down from the spur of the Italian boot. The region boasts beautiful landscapes and miles of dramatic coastline, cities with Romanesque cathedrals, Gothic castles, and a tremendous wealth of Baroque architecture, as well as rupestrian churches containing Byzantine frescoes. Yet until this book, almost nothing about the region had been published in English since the days of Norman Douglas and the Sitwells.Filling that gap, Old Puglia is an entertaining exploration of the area and its historical influences, cultural sites, and emerging popularity. Now fashionable as the new Tuscany, Puglia is featured on radio and television; travel supplements describe its beaches and cooking; and supermarkets worldwide stock Apulian wine, olive oil, bread, and pasta.Desmond Seward and Susan Mountgarret introduce readers to the story behind the destination, as they combine in-depth writing on Puglian history with discussions of the area s contemporary culture.A fascinating look at a region whose ancient roots continue to delight modern enthusiasts, Old Puglia will entertain travelers, history buffs, and everyone with a taste for Italy.

Lars Gustafsson and Agneta Blomqvist have written a personal guide to their Swedish homeland. Setting off from the south their journey leads them all the way up to Norrland, from the farms of Scania to the Laponian area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But it is the idyllic fjord in Bohuslan, in the Vastmanland region, as well as Lake Malar and Stockholm that they call home. Alive with their varied interests and entertaining suggestions for excursions - from journeys across the forests and moors to collect berries and mushrooms, encountering the odd elk or wolf along the way, to visits to the graves of Kurt Tucholsky and Strindberg, Smile of a Midsummer Night is knowledgeable, loving and poetic. A must-have for all fans of Sweden.

Haile Salassie, the scion of a dynasty that was reputed to descend from King Soloman, was a pioneer of African unity and independence, a staunch confederate of the Allies in their fight against the fascist Axis powers and the messiah of the Jamaican Rastafarian movement. A reformer and an autocracy, his rule was brought to a brutal and ignominious end when he was toppled and and murdered by communist rebels.Asfa-Wossen Asserate – a close descendant, who knew the Emperor personally – for the first time brings clarity to the life of this impressive and complex personality. King of Kings is the story of the most eminent African ruler of the 20th century and the country he ruled through both stirring and tragic times.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the forces of resistance were disparate and divided mujahideen groups, as interested in fighting each other and competing for Western arms as opposing the Russians. The exception was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military strategist and political operator who solidified the resistance and undermined the Russian occupation by leading its members to a series of defensive victories.Sandy Gall was embedded with Massoud during Soviet offences and reported on the war in Afghanistan for a number of years. He has now written an illuminating biography of this charismatic guerrilla commander, which contains excerpts from the surviving volumes of Massoud's diaries. Massoud's prolific diary-keeping was little known during his lifetime, and his entries detail crucial moments in his life and throw fascinating light on his struggles, both in the resistance and in his personal life. Born into an ostensibly liberalising Afghanistan in the 1960s, Massoud ardently opposed communism and Mohammed Daoud, Afghanistan's puppet leader. He quickly rose to prominence and distinguished himself by coordinating the defence of the Panjshir Valley against repeated Soviet offensives. As the occupation wore on, Massoud became the resistance's unifying force.Massoud's assassination in 2001 presaged the attack on the Twin Towers just two days later and it is widely believed to have been ordered by Osama bin Laden. Forever the underdog in a life dominated by conflict, Massoud's attempts to build political consensus in Afghanistan were ultimately frustrated. Despite that, he is recognised today as a national hero.

It's a pitch black, rainy night in a small Iranian town. Inside his house the Colonel is immersed in thought. Memories are storming in. Memories of his wife. Memories of the great patriots of the past, all of them assassinated or executed. Memories of his children, who had joined the different factions of the 1979 revolution. There is a knock on the door. Two young policemen have come to summon the Colonel to collect the tortured body of his youngest daughter and bury her before sunrise. The Islamic Revolution, like every other revolution in history, is devouring its own children. And whose fault is that? This shocking diatribe against the failures of the Iranian left over the last fifty years does not leave one taboo unbroken.

What does it mean to lead with compassion in a world riven by fear, at a time when the responses to forced displacement hold the power to reshape communities? How can institutions and individuals sustain solidarity amid rising division?This moving reflection of Filippo Grandi’s ten years as UN High Commissioner for Refugees and four decades spent working in humanitarian crises across the world addresses the growing complexity of forced displacement, its repercussions for international relations, and the challenges it poses for governments. Grandi calls for greater cooperation between nations and considers measures – along displacement routes and in host countries – which would provide life-saving assistance to refugees as well as preserve international cooperation and goodwill. He suggests a universal responsibility not to exacerbate division but to work diligently on the space between pragmatism and principle.Taking up this challenge, Catherine Ashton’s response to Grandi draws on her own distinguished leadership during some of the most important moments that have shaped contemporary diplomacy, and suggests how enduring principles can be retained within the realities of public life.

Otto von Bismarck (1815-98) has gone down in history as the Iron Chancellor, a reactionary and militarist whose 1871 unification of Germany set Europe down the path of disaster to World War I. But as Volker Ullrich shows in this new edition of his accessible biography, the real Bismarck was far more complicated than the stereotype. A leading historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, Ullrich demonstrates that the "Founder of the Reich" was in fact an opponent of liberal German nationalism. After the wars of 1866 and 1870, Bismarck spent the rest of his career working to preserve peace in Europe and protect the empire he had created. Despite his reputation as an enemy of socialism, he introduced comprehensive health and unemployment insurance for German workers. Far from being a "man of iron and blood," Bismarck was in fact a complex statesman who was concerned with maintaining stability and harmony far beyond Germany's newly unified borders. Comprehensive and balanced, Bismarck shows us the post-reunification value of looking anew at this monumental figure's role in European history

In the spring of 1945 the Allies arrested the physicists they believed had worked on the German nuclear programme during the war. Interned in an English country house, their conversations were secretly recorded. MI6's Operation Epsilon sought to determine how close Nazi Germany had come to building an atomic bomb. It was in this remote setting - Farm Hall, near Cambridge - that the German physicists first heard of the bombing ofHiroshima. August 6 1945 was a night that changed the course of history. The terrible weapon unleashed on Japan caused unprecedented destruction and loss of life. That the Allies had such a weapon at their disposal came as a great shock to the German scientists who had worked under the assumption that the Allies knew nothing of nuclear fission. This is the story of the wartime race to develop an atomic bomb, and the genius, guilt, complicity and hubris of Nobel Prize-winning scientists working to create a weapon that would undoubtedly have won the war for the Germans.

Kathmandu is the greatest city of the Himalaya; a place where unique cultural practices that died out in India a thousand years ago have survived. It is a carnival of sexual license and hypocrisy, a jewel of world art, a hotbed of communist revolution, a paradigm of failed democracy, a case study in bungled Western intervention, and an environmental catastrophe.Kathmandu’s rapid modernisation is an extreme version of what is happening in many traditional societies with the destabilising spirits of consumer aspiration, individuality, egalitarianism, communism and democracy. Erudite, entertaining and accessible, this is the fascinating chronicle of a unique city.

This is the true story of Aziz BineBine who, unwittingly entangled in a failed coup against King Hassan II, found himself locked in a small, underground cell in a prison thought to be a mere horror story: Tazmamart. For 18 years, no one knew where the prison’s inmates were. No one knew if they were even alive. In many ways, they hardly were: confined for 24 hours a day, with the barest rations, no hygiene or medical help, and accompanied by cockroaches, scorpions, and tarantulas. One of the few to survive, Aziz writes not only to tell his own remarkable story but to remember and honour the men that lived – and died – alongside him. Against the backdrop of this unimaginable suffering, Aziz shows the strength of the human spirit to keep going against all the odds, to smile in the face of misery, and to forgive rather than condemn. Set to become a cult classic of survival literature, Tazmamart is a hellish journey through the abyss of despair – and out the other side.

The Socialist politician Karl Renner (1870 1950) was prime minister of the government that took power in Vienna after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lead the delegation to Paris, which had to face the difficult issue of reparations and war guilt, for which the Allies held the successor states to the Empire responsible for. Fortunately, Renner was a likeable man and a realist, and the Austrian delegation became quite popular in Paris. The new Austrian state was in a perilous condition in 1919, on the brink of starvation and revolution, and facing territorial demands from both Italy, which had its eyes on the Tyrol, and the new Yugoslavia. Many in the German-speaking rump of the Empire sought union with Germany, Anschluss, but the Allied Powers vetoed it. Austria is often overlooked as one of the successor states to the Habsburg Empire, but it was no less important in the postwar settlement than Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Balkan countries. Jamie Bulloch's account of Karl Renner's adroit handling of a difficult situation makes for fascinating reading.

In 2006, "Time magazine" listed the King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, as one of the 100 'leaders and revolutionaries' who are changing our world today. Yet it was only in the 1960s that the first road linking "The Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon" with India was opened, and since 1974 only a strictly limited number of tourists have been allowed to visit each year. Martin Uitz, a renowned expert on Bhutan, describes how the Bhutanese, in pursuit of the principle of 'Gross National Happiness', are carefully moving towards a more modern future, including a constitution and democracy, whilst preserving their traditional society and attempting to conserve the environment. Uitz made many fascinating discoveries in this enigmatic Kingdom. He was able to explain why the only traffic light was taken out of service, why six men are not allowed to go on a journey together, and what the subtle eroticism of a traditional hot-stone bath is all about. Along the way he also discovered that the Bhutanese hills are more alive with Edelweiss than the hills around his native Salzburg.

In an accessible survey of the last century, Contested Lands tells the story of the Middle East since the First World War: what happened, why, and what it all means today.With a focus on the many conflicts in the region over the last one hundred years, T. G. Fraser analyses the fault lines of the tension: the damaging legacies of imperialism; the creation of the State of Israel; the competition between secular, autocratic rulers and emerging democratic and theocratic forces; and the rise - and fall - of Arab Nationalism in the face of fraying regional alliances and the Islamic revival.Against this backdrop comes the twenty-first century, marked first by the tragedy of 9/11, then the 'Arab Spring', the Syria's civil war and now the Israel-Hamas conflict. And amid it all, complex social and economic change have transformed the region. In Contested Lands, T. G. Fraser untangles the threads of history in the Middle East and, in doing so, weaves a detailed and insightful picture of a troubled region and why its heritage remains important today.

In the Gaza Strip, growing up on land owned by his family for centuries, fourteen-year-old Yousef is preoccupied by video games, school pranks, and meeting his father’s impossibly high standards.Everything changes when the Second Intifada erupts and soldiers occupy the family home, turning it into a virtual prison. Overtime, Yousef learns the rules of his new life in captivity – but he can’t anticipate that an Israeli bullet is about to transform his future in an instant.

The sights and sounds of Venice provoked and enthralled the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, luring him back again and again to the city in which he found the decaying shipyards and back alleys as enchanting as the iconic landmarks.Throughout Rilke’s ten visits to Venice, whether staying in a simple guesthouse or a palazzo, there was one constant: he walked prodigiously, determined to discover every corner of the city on foot.Birgit Haustedt guides the reader on eleven Venetian walks, retracing Rilke’s footsteps and recounting his words to give travellers a new perspective on this captivating city, from the humble to the sublime.

The story of the Arab Revolt and the Hashemite princes who led it during the First World War is inextricably linked in modern eyes to the legend of "Lawrence of Arabia" as portrayed in David Lean's 1962 film. But behind this romantic image lies a harsher reality of wartime expediency, double-dealing and dynastic ambition, which shaped the modern Middle East and laid the foundations of many of the conflicts that rack the region to this day. Arab nationalists claim that British instigation for the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire was a commitment to independence for the Arab people, but in this book Robert McNamara shows how the British cultivated the Hashemite Sherifs of Mecca more as an alternative focus during the First World War for Muslim loyalty from the Ottoman Sultan, who as Caliph had declared a jihad against the Allies when the Turks joined the Central Powers, than a leader of an independent and united Arabia. At the same time, the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided up the Middle East between British and French spheres of influence. The sense of betrayal that this caused has coloured Arab nationalists' views of the West ever since.The main countries of the Middle East Jordan, Syria and Iraq are all the creations of the post-First World War settlement worked out at the Paris Peace Conference. The story of the Hashemite dynasty at the Paris Peace Conference is the story of the birth of the modern history of a region that is now more than ever at the centre of world affairs.

As the seat of prince-bishops it found wealth and power, as the birthplace of Mozart it found fame, and as a festival city it found its purpose and destiny. But can today’s Salzburg really be described by anything more than music and majestic baroque architecture?Hubert Nowak, who lived and worked in Salzburg for many years, sets out to find the lesser-known side of the city. Leaving the festival district, he plunges into the atmospheric old quarter and places known only to natives – and often not even to them.Through the stories of those who visited the city over the centuries, he gives the reader a fresh perspective and gives the old city new life. Salzburg: A City of Culture is essential reading for anyone interested in visiting the city.

In November 1913, three German shipbuilders, led by master shipwright Anton Ru ter, were ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm II to dismantle a steam ship, send the parts to German East Africa, and reassemble it on Lake Tanganyi- ka. Their initial aim of getting the task done quickly and returning home to claim an excellent salary is quickly eclipsed by the enchantment of the exotic landscape, the governor's beautiful wife, and the violent machinery of colonialism. At the same time, Winston Churchill sends Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson to transport two dilapidated and incongruously named gun-boats, Mimi and Toutou, to the other side of the lake. When World War I breaks out the Germans and British are facing each other, and the boat-builders reluctantly find themselves having to fight under the unsympathetic Captain-Lieutenant Gustav von Zimmer.

Alex Capus follows every step of Robert Louis Stevenson's last years, studying every clue left behind by the Scottish writer and reaching his own conclusion about the most dramatic turn in Stevenson's life: his decision to settle in Samoa, where the climate was poison for his already diseased lungs. When he arrived there in 1889, neither Stevenson nor his family particularly liked the Pacific island and wanted to stay for only a few days. Yet soon afterwards he changed his mind and, intriguingly, spent what little remained of his savings on a plot of land and began living there on a meagre income. Before long Stevenson set about building an opulent villa and lived out the rest of his days in splendour. What had happened? Capus asserts that Stevenson not only wrote the world-famous novel "Treasure Island" here but searched for the treasure himself and furthermore found it towards the end of his life, on a little island he could see from the peak of the mountain in Samoa where he settled.

An old shoe factory in a costal New England town is up for sale again. When a private equity mogul with a fondness for the factory’s shoes buys it, he sets in motion a story with profound implications for the way we live today. The people of Bealport depend on Norumbega. Their livelihoods, their self-respect and their interconnectedness are all at stake. The shadow of the factory’s fate looms over the people of the town. Idiosyncratic and humane, the cast is the kind that small communities under threat produce. Bealport is a portrait of a place, at once sympathetic, mordant, unsparing, comic, tragic and universal, and of a way of life that is passing. It is a novel of a town, and to no small degree of every town in America and beyond.

Dear Leonard Cohen,Could I ask you something, just between us? How was it that you never changed your name? You could have been Lawrence Cole. You could have been Lindsay Kohl, or Lionel Cone...So begins the story of an everyman Leonard Cohen, a would-be artist, a would-be lover, a would-be tragic figure, yet a man haunted by the greatness of his namesake. He struggles to compete. He struggles to be more than a punchline in his own mind. He struggles, in particular, to write one song as great as the least of the great Leonard Cohen's songs.At the center of Leonard's life is Daphne. In their meeting on a Greek island, a contemporary fable of Daphne and Apollo plays out. But even with her, Leonard is shadowed by the "other" Leonard Cohen. The ancient myth haunts the fated lovers of this novel, in which art, love, and fame all fatefully intertwine.

Gustaf Mannerheim was on of the greatest figures of the twentieth century. As a young Finnish officer in Russian service he witnessed the coronation the last Tsar and was both reprimanded for his foolhardiness and decorated for his bravery in the Russo-Japanese War.He spent two years undercover in Asia as an agent in the ‘Great Game’, posing as a Swedish anthropologist. Crossing China on horseback, he stopped en route to teach the thirteenth Dalai Lama how to shoot a pistol and spied on the Japanese navy.Having escaped the Bolshevicks by the skin of his teeth in 1917, he led the anti-Russian forces in the local revolt and civil war and later, during Finland’s darkest hour, he lead the defence of his country against the impossible odds of the Winter War.In this, the first major English language biography of Mannerheim for a decade, Jonathan Clements brings new material to light on Mannerheim’s time in Manchuria, China and Japan. The result is a fascinating appraisal of an adventurer and explorer who would go on to forge a new nation.

Syracuse, on the eastern coast of Sicily, was one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean: a place of brute power, dazzling culture, and vivid myth. Here, tyrants waged wars and built vast palaces, Aeschylus staged tragedies, Plato hoped to create his ideal ‘philosopher king’, and the nymph Arethusa, transformed into water, lived on as a spring fringed with papyrus.Moving to the city after a bereavement, the poet Joachim Sartorius discovers a place of haunting and haunted beauty, where the layers of the past are always visible. At his side we wander with demigods and generals through the old town of Ortigia and meet the people of the present-day city: its artists and police officers, café owners and barbers, barons and refugees.Unravelling the threads of Sicilian history, Sartorius explores the city’s mingling of ancient and modern, Greek and Arab, medieval and baroque, creating a portrait of a city inseparably entwined with its past.

The River Ganges has a thousand names. Hindu priests regard it as a sin to call her a river at all. She is a goddess, the source of the world, her waters holy and healing and still sold to Hindus all over the world. Ilija Trojanow travelled along the Ganges, from the source, where it breaks free from the eternal ice in the Himalayas, to the great cities, by boat, by bus, on overcrowded trains. He visited the great Hindu festivals and talked to those who warn of ecological disasters. His colourful report describes a country between ancient traditions and astonishing modernity and the holy river that crosses it for hundreds of miles.

It is the charm of ‘uncushioned encounters with the world’ that makes Millay Hyatt travel by train. Experiencing the excitement of departure and arrival – and, in between, the bittersweet joy of being in limbo, of looking inward – she observes how long train journeys, like books, alter us in a way jet travel has all but extinguished, and impart even sleep with an unfamiliar quality.Long-distance rail travel is a story of serendipity and missed connections, of sluggish border crossings, of embracing unpredictability and shunning the stifling regimentation of contemporary travel. In her journeys across Europe and beyond, from Edinburgh to Tunis, from Valencia to Tbilisi, Hyatt shows that it is in movement that our perspective changes – and that this is never truer than when travelling by train.Itself a journey, abundant with reflection, poetic observation, and literary excursions, Days on the Night Train is a paean to travelling by rail, to Europe’s landscapes, and to an immersive way of seeing the world.

Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was an artist of his time, but he also stood out among his peers - not just because of his towering physical height but for his artistic range. Using both brush and pen to work against the tide, he wrote plays and stories as well as essays on art and politics, playing a major role in the development of twentieth-century European art.A rebel of the art world, he was used to controversy, and Rüdiger Görner's accomplished biography traces the dark, unsettling aspects of Kokoschka's life alongside his more celebrated achievements: from the eerie doll he had made in the image of a former lover to the unconventional art school he founded in the aftermath of the Second Word War.Taking us from his birthplace of Pöchlarn across Europe and to the United Kingdom, where he became a naturalised British citizen in 1947, this first English-language biography does more than show Kokoschka as a maverick artist; it is the definitive interpretation of an extraordinary life.

Ernest Hemingway is most often associated with Spain, Cuba and Florida, but Italy was equally important in his life and work. This book, the first full-length study on the subject, explores Hemingway’s visits throughout his life to such places as Sicily, Genoa, Rapallo, Cortina and Venice. Richard Owen describes how Hemingway first visited Italy during the First World War, an experience that set the scene for A Farewell to Arms. The writer then returned after the Second World War, and found inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees. When Men Without Women was published, some reviewers declared Hemingway to be at heart a reporter preoccupied with bullfighters, soldiers, prostitutes and hard drinkers, but their claims failed to note that he also wrote sensitively and passionately about love and loss against an Italian backdrop. Owen highlights the significance of Italy in the writer’s life. Showing how the Italian landscape, from the Venetian lagoon to the Dolomites and beyond, deeply affected one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Hemingway in Italy demonstrates that this country stands alongside Spain as a key influence on his writing — and why the Italians themselves took Hemingway and his writing to heart.