Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines That Fought the Cold War by Gary E. Weir & Walter J. Boyne

Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines That Fought the Cold War by Gary E. Weir & Walter J. Boyne lands on the shelves of my shop.

New York: Basic Books, 2003, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black and White Photographs;

From the cover: Of all the Secrets the Soviet Union kept, none were more closely guarded than those involving their submarines. Throughout the Cold War, Soviet submariners patrolled the worlds oceans, playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with their American counterparts in a silent struggle hundreds of feet below the surface. For the first time, Rising Tide tells the Soviet side of these secretive operations. Drawing on newly available archives, as well as interviews with a dozen former Soviet commanders access never before granted to Western researchers this gripping narrative shows that confrontations between nuclear-armed subs were far more dangerous than we ever thought.

With sixteen pages of never-before-seen photos, Rising Tide recounts successful Soviet operations, including top-secret exercises off the American coast, and espionage coups, such as the spy-ship that monitored American missile tests off the Florida coast and collected the debris in full view of the US Navy. All too common were the near-misses, heroic rescues, and deadly catastrophes that plagued Soviet submarines over the years, including the horrific nuclear accident on board the ill-fated K-19, later nicknamed the Hiroshima; the internal fire that sank the K-8 in 1970 with twenty-two sailors on board, and the dramatic escape of crewmembers from the Komsomolets in 1989, as narrated by a survivor.

Russian submariners fought two battles in the Cold War: one against their American opponents, and another against the cruel Soviet leadership that knowingly put their lives at risk and caused so many needless deaths. Rising Tide also provides dramatic first-hand evidence that the final decision to launch a nuclear weapon resided solely in the hands of Soviet sub commanders. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the tragic sinking of the Kursk in 2000, Rising Tide offers an extraordinary insiders history of the Soviet submarine service, and sheds new light on the darkest secrets of the Cold War.

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper.

Black boards with Silver titling to the Spine. [XIII] 354 pages. Index. Bibliography. 9½” x 6¼”.

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The Boer War by Tabitha Jackson

The Boer War by Tabitha Jackson lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Channel 4 Books , 1999, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Facsimiles; Maps;

From the cover: The BOER WAR (1899-1902) shaped the destiny of South Africa and, as Rudyard Kipling remarked, taught the mighty British Empire no end of a lesson.

It was said to be the last of the gentlemans wars, a white mans war and it would be over by Christmas. It was none of these things. The Boer War was brutal, racially explosive, and it took the greatest empire in the world nearly three years to beat a Boer army smaller than the population of Brighton.

The Boer War catapulted the world into the twentieth century, prefiguring the worst excesses of modern conflicts: the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, scorched earth, rape, concentration camps. It was also a civil war, dividing families, communities, and races.

Startling new material reveals the involvement of blacks on both sides fighting at the front and dying in a network of black-only concentration camps. Black support and participation were rewarded with broken promises and betrayal; the peace settlement endorsed white supremacy in South Africa.

The combination of new research, powerful oral testimony, and a wealth of recently discovered letters and diaries makes The Boer War, and the Channel 4 series made by Twenty Twenty Television that it accompanies, an important reassessment. Illustrated throughout with many previously unseen photographs, The Boer War is a unique history of a much misunderstood conflict that has cast a long shadow across the century.

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper.

Grey boards with Silver titling to the Spine. 192 pages. Index. Bibliography. 10″ x 7¾”.

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Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir by Jean Trumpington

Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir by Jean Trumpington lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Macmillan, 2014, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black and White Photographs;

From the cover: In this witty and characteristically trenchant memoir, the indomitable Jean Trumpington looks back on her long and remarkable life. The daughter of an officer in the Bengal Lancers and an American heiress, Jean Campbell-Harris was born into a world of considerable privilege, but the Wall Street Crash entirely wiped out her mothers fortune.

Leaving school at fifteen, without ever taking an exam, the young Jean was sent to Paris to study art and both French and German, but two years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, she became a land girl on a farm owned by Lloyd George, a family friend however, she soon changed direction, joining naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, where she stayed for the rest of the war. After the war she worked first in Paris and then in New York, on Madison Avenue, with advertisings mad men. It was in New York that she met her husband, the historian Alan Barker, and their marriage, in 1954, ushered in the happiest period of her life -bringing up her only son, Adam, and becoming a not entirely conventional headmasters wife, before embarking on her distinguished political career, as a Cambridge City councillor, Mayor of Cambridge and, since 1980, a life peer.

Vivid, forthright and often very funny, Coming Up Trumps is a wonderfully readable account of a life very well lived.

Very Good+ in Very Good+ Dust Wrapper.

Black boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XIII] 236 pages. 8¾” x 5½”.

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The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State 1922-1997 by Alan Clark

The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State 1922-1997 by Alan Clark lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Tables; Illustrated endpapers and blanks;

From the cover: Alan Clark returns brilliantly to the role of historian, with which he originally made his name.

The Tories is his personal account of the modern Conservatives, who for the better part of this century have been the governing political party of Britain.

During this period the country has fallen in stature, both comparative and absolute, by virtually every criterion of measurement which can be applied. Yet the Conservative Partys primary objective, or so it claims and its supporters believe, is to advance and protect the interests of the British Nation State.

To understand the catastrophic and repetitious failure of the Tories to attain that objective, over practically the whole of the past seventy-five years, Alan Clark examines afresh personalities and argument on occasions as diverse as the Gold Standard dispute of 1925; the abdication of King Edward VIII; the failure of Appeasement; the mishandling of North Sea oil; the alternating inspiration and hubris of Margaret Thatcher.

In The Tories he shows how the apparent interest of the Nation State seems often to have been neglected, but that Conservatives, with the sole exception of the first Churchill premiership, perceived its real interest differently as being best served, above all other considerations, by the perpetuation of the Party in office.

To this exposition, Alan Clark brings his personal experience of Government, which he has recorded in his celebrated Diaries; and the acknowledged skills of a historian whose books on the extremes of two world wars, the British Expeditionary Force in 1915 (The Donkeys) and the Russo-German conflict of 1941-45 (Barbarossa) are classics, still in print after more than thirty years.

To understand the Conservatives from Bonar Law to John Major one need look no further than Alan Clarks The Tories.

Very Good in Good+ Dust Wrapper. Gently faded at the spine of the dust wrapper which is showing a little wear to the edges. Edges of the text block lightly spotted. Text complete, clean and tight.

Black boards with Silver titling to the Spine. [XVII] 493 pages. Index. Bibliography. 9½” x 6¼”.

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Lion by the Tail: The Story of the Italian-Ethiopian War by Thomas M. Coffey

Lion by the Tail: The Story of the Italian-Ethiopian War by Thomas M. Coffey lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Plates; Maps to the endpapers and blanks;

From the cover: When a company of Ethiopian soldiers clashed on December 5th, 1934, with a garrison force of Italian troops at a desert water-hole called Wal Wal, about 450 miles southeast of Addis Ababa, the incident seemed so trivial that some European and American newspapers ignored it; others gave it only two or three lines. Yet this encounter set off a chain of events which produced a hideous war between Ethiopia and Italy and made the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (known as the Lion of Judah) into a world-famous tragic hero. It exposed the weakness and cynicism of the European and American democracies, destroyed the League of Nations, and led directly to World War II.

Lion by the Tail is the story of Mussolinis 1935-6 invasion of Ethiopia and of the diplomatic duplicity which made it possible. The book shows that, while the Italian-Ethiopian War cannot be said to have caused World War II, it was the most important single event in bringing about that cataclysm.

The human aspects of the bloody struggle between the bare-footed Ethiopians and the mechanized, mustard-gas spraying Italians are dramatically emphasized. But Lion by the Tail also presents documentary proof that reasonable firmness by the French, British and American governments would have prevented Mussolinis vieious adventure, and would thereby have warned Hitler against adopting Mussolinis bluffing, bullying diplomatic tactics. When Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, Stanley Baldwin, Pierre Laval and even Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to stop Mussolini, it appeared to Hitler that such men would do nothing to stop him.

In describing the tragic failure of democratic diplomacy as well as the violent battle scenes between the Italians and Ethiopians, Lion by the Tail not only brings to life the full story of that brutal war, but also contributes importantly to our understanding of the even more brutal war which began three years later.

Good+ in Very Good Dust Wrapper. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper with a light scratch across the head of the upper panel. The pages are somewhat tanned, if tight, and a little musty.

Black boards with Silver titling to the Spine. [XIII] 369 pages. Index. Bibliography. 9½” x 6¼”.

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The Last Kaiser: William the Impetuous by Giles MacDonogh

The Last Kaiser: William the Impetuous by Giles MacDonogh lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Phoenix Press, 2001, Paperback.

First in this, paperback, edition. Illustrated by way of: Black and White Photographs;

From the cover: Prussias last King and Germanys last Kaiser was born in Potsdam in 1859, the son of Prince Frederick of Prussia and Princess Vicky, Queen Victorias eldest child.

William was born with a withered arm and suffered from cerebral palsy. Believed mad by some, eccentric by others, he possessed a ferocious temper, was rumoured to have sired numerous illegitimate children (and suspected of homosexual affairs) and yet appeared a prig. A power grabber who built a fleet targeted at Britain, he nevertheless idolised Queen Victoria who, he claimed, died in his arms.

William II was also a war monger whose sabre-rattling over Serbia brought about the First World War which cost him his own throne and his countrys defeat.

Near Fine.

[XII] 532 pages. Index. Bibliography. Trade Paperback (9¼” x 6″).

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Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw

Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw lands on the shelves of my shop.

Allen Lane, 2000, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps;

From the cover: WHETHER RIGHT OR WRONG, WE MUST WIN. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY. AND IT IS MORALLY RIGHT AND NECESSARY. AND WHEN WE HAVE WON, WHO WILL ASK US ABOUT THE METHOD? ADOLF HITLER, 1941

It is impossible to offer an adequate parallel to Hitlers situation in 1936. With the peaceful resolution of the Rhineland crisis, Hitler became both the adored object of the vast majority of Germans and an international symbol of modernity and dynamism. He managed this while in reality being the dictator of a system of single-minded viciousness new to human experience.

Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis is the definitive account of the twentieth centurys central figure. Drawing on a vast range of material and using the same skills that made Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris a bestseller around the world, lan Kershaw allows us to understand both the dictator himself and the society that made him.

Perhaps this books greatest achievement is to make clear the often conflicting dynamics that led from the seemingly stable, successful Germany of 1937 to the brutalized military state of the 1940s. By concentrating on the figure of Hitler, Kershaw both gives an immediacy and texture to these terrible events and shows the options available to Germany and its ruler at each point in the unfolding disaster. At the heart of the book lies Hitlers decision to unleash annihilatory war in the East and the terrifying new moral universe this brought into being: the degradation of enemies into beasts and the hatching of the Final Solution.

This is the story of a poisoned world and of a man who was both shaped by that world and to a catastrophic degree created it.

Good+ in Good+ Dust Wrapper. Gently bruised at the spine ends and corners with commensurate wear to the dust wrapper. Text complete, clean and tight.

Black boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XLVI] 1115 pages. Index. Bibliography. 9½” x 6¼”.

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Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen by Tracy Borman

Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen by Tracy Borman lands on the shelves of my shop.

Jonathan Cape, 2009, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Colour Plates;

From the cover: Elizabeth I was born into a world of women. As a child, she was served by a predominantly female household of servants and governesses, with occasional visits from her mother, Anne Boleyn, and the wives who later took her place. As Queen, she was constantly attended by ladies of the bedchamber and maids of honour who clothed her, bathed her and watched over her while she ate. Among her family, it was her female relations who had the greatest influence: from her sister Mary, who distrusted and later imprisoned her, to her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, who posed a constant and dangerous threat to her crown for almost thirty years.

Despite the importance of women in Elizabeths life, most historians and biographers have focused on her relationships with men. She has been portrayed as a mans woman who loved to flirt with the many ambitious young men who frequented her court. Yet it is the women in her life who provide the most fascinating insight into the character of this remarkable monarch. With them she was jealous, spiteful and cruel, as well as loyal, kind and protective. She showed her frailties and her insecurities, but also her considerable shrewdness and strength. In short, she was more human than the public persona she presented to the rest of the court.

In this original chronicling of the life of one of Englands greatest monarchs, historian Tracy Borman explores Elizabeths relationships with the key women in her life. Beginning with her mother and the governesses and stepmothers who cared for the young princess, including her beloved Kat Astley and the inspirational Katherine Parr, Elizabeths Women sheds new light on her formative years. Elizabeths turbulent relationships with her rivals are examined: from her sister, Bloody Mary, to the sisters of Lady Jane Grey, and finally the most deadly of all her rivals, Mary, Queen of Scots, who would give birth to the man Elizabeth would finally, inevitably, have to recognise as heir to her throne. These are the servants, friends and flouting wenches who brought out the best and the worst of Elizabeths carefully cultivated image as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, in the glittering world of her court.

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper. Leans otherwise a very well presented copy.

Black boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XIII] 450 pages. Index. Bibliography. 9½” x 6¼”.

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Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth by Edward Jay Epstein

Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth by Edward Jay Epstein lands on the shelves of my shop.

Hutchinson, 1966, Hardback in dust wrapper.

From the cover: The primary subject of this book is the Warren Commission not the assassination itself states the author. It began as a masters thesis at Cornell University, the object of which was to examine the workings of an extraordinary government organisation in an extraordinary national situation; as Epstein puts it truth finding in a political environment. Were not the events of November 22nd 1963 even now fresh in most peoples minds, this book would still merit the closest attention, because it exposes how even the most distinguished commission of enquiry, with the resources of the entire United States Government to hand, still failed to establish the truth. INQUEST should be read by all who accept the Commission, whether Presidential or Royal, as a tool of good government.

Epsteins fundamental criticism rests on the divided purpose of the enquiry. The paramount purpose may well have been simply to make the truth known, but the question remains, Why? The appointment of Chief Justice Warren implies that one purpose was to protect the national interest and restore American prestige abroad. Thus, the termination of rumours and the restoration of domestic tranquillity was the implicit purpose jeopardizing the achievement of truth.

The author examines with cold and devastating logic the various problems of the assassination which did not receive the attention they merited from the Commission. How many shots were fired at the motorcade? Did the first bullet that hit Kennedy also cause Governor Connallys wounds? Did Oswald have an accomplice? Was Oswald at one stage a paid F. B. I. informer?

Edward Jay Epstein, now working on a doctoral programme in American government at Harvard, has written a book causing a furore in the United States which is of acute relevance to the rest of the world. Richard Goodwin, one of President Kennedys assistants writes of it Mr Epstein makes his case in so logical and detached a manner that it demands equally serious exploration and refutation If we cannot deny this book, then the investigation must be reopened if we wish to approach the truth more closely.

Introduction by: Richard H. Revere

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper. Edges of the text block lightly tanned. Offset to the blanks.

Black boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XIX] 224 pages. Index. 8½” x 5½”.

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History of English Education from 1760 by H. C. Howard Clive Barnard

History of English Education from 1760 by H. C. [Howard Clive] Barnard lands on the shelves of my shop.

University of London Press, 1969, Hardback in dust wrapper.

2nd Edition, 6th (revised) impression. [First Edition: 1947 as A Short History of English Education from 1760 To 1944] Illustrated by way of: Chronological Tables;

From the cover: This account of educational development from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to the present day surveys the building-up of the administrative structure of the educational system, the growth of educational theory and practice, the evolution of institutions such as schools, colleges and universities, the work of individual teachers and educationists, and the progress of curriculum change and in teaching techniques, all of which are seen against the background of the social and economic conditions from which they are inseparable. Clearly and precisely written, and including many references to enable general statements to be followed up by the reader, this book has proved its value to teachers and teachers in training, to education officials, and to all interested in the interpretation of the present educational situation in its historical context.

Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded. Edges of the text block lightly tanned. Scattered pencil underlining and marginlia with the chapter numbers of the contents page struck through in pen. Text complete, clean and tight otherwise.

Blue boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XVII] 364 pages. Index. Bibliography. 8¾” x 5¾”.

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