Government & Politics

‘Damien Lewis is both a meticulous historian and a born storyteller’ Lee Child

SAS Great Escapes Two recounts the hitherto untold stories of six of the most dramatic and daring escapes executed by the world’s most famous fighting force during WWII. From the very earliest SAS missions to the push into Nazi-occupied Europe, they cover some of the key figures in the Regiment, including its founder, David Stirling, plus other lesser-known heroes.

With each story comes an edge-of-the-seat, rollercoaster ride in classic Damien Lewis fashion, as readers are plunged into the escapees’ experiences – sharing their most terrifying yet inspiring moments. These stunning accounts of survival beggar belief, revealing nerve-racking bluff and deception, knife-edge encounters with enemy hunter forces hellbent on wreaking vengeance and murder, but also incredible acts of mercy and kindness from those who risk all to help the escapees on their way.

Each tale of breath-taking derring-do reveals how necessity really is the mother of all invention, as with every step and at every juncture these fugitives defied fate, snatching survival and freedom from the jaws of the enemy, and all the horrors that would have followed capture.

Damien Lewis has worked closely with the families of those portrayed, accessing wartime diaries, letters, mission reports, interrogation transcripts and more, to relate how the men of the SAS crossed blazing deserts, evaded enemy hunter forces and escaped through hostile lands, battling against seemingly insurmountable odds. But most of all, these uplifting tales of endurance beyond measure showcase the triumph of the human spirit and the will to survive.

‘Damien Lewis paints a uniquely vivid picture of the wartime SAS. Packed with detail, this fresh and dynamic book brings us as close to its remarkable members as we are ever likely to get.’ Joshua Levine, author of
Dunkirk

‘In these days when we are told to be scared of everything it is a relief to read of steely nerves and cold courage. Damien Lewis has collected examples of exactly these qualities from World War II and they are all thrillers, to be read with pleasure – and a bit of nostalgia!’ Frederick Forsyth

‘The fund of SAS escapes turns out to be too big for one book, and in Damien Lewis there is a writer of rare narrative gifts able to bring alive these epic stories for us today’ Mark Urban

‘An astonishing book: a collection of truly riveting stories of bravery, all brilliantly told. In terms of sheer drama and audacity, SAS: Great Escapes Two goes where no fiction writer would dare venture’ Alex Gerlis, author of Agent in the Shadows

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A Waterstones Best History Book of 2023

The incredible true story of the SAS’ daring mission to liberate Europe

In the summer of 1943, the largest invasion fleet ever assembled sailed for fortress Europe, aiming to bulldoze its way onto Nazi shores. At its vanguard went a few hundred elite forces soldiers, the Royal Navy warship carrying them bearing the iconic winged dagger emblem on its prow, plus the motto ‘Who Dares Wins’.

Led by the legendary SAS commander Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, these war-bitten, piratical raiders were tasked to do the impossible – to bludgeon their way through the most heavily defended enemy shoreline, so enabling the ensuing forces to follow on.

If they succeeded, it would mark the turning point in the war. If they failed, the consequences were unthinkable. Against all odds, outnumbered some fifty-to-one, and facing a ferocious series of cliffside defences, they would have to dare all as never before.

So begins the incredible true story of the SAS’s mission to liberate Europe.

Action-packed and filled with heroic endeavour, SAS Forged in Hell is breath-taking combat writing at its best, in true Damien Lewis style.

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Histories you can trust.

World War Two was the most devastating conflict in recorded human history. It was both global in extent and total in character. It has understandably left a long and dark shadow across the decades. Yet it is three generations since hostilities formally ended in 1945 and the conflict is now a lived memory for only a few. And this growing distance in time has allowed historians to think differently about how to describe it, how to explain its course, and what subjects to focus on when considering the wartime experience.

For instance, as World War Two recedes ever further into the past, even a question as apparently basic as when it began and ended becomes less certain. Was it 1939, when the war in Europe began? Or the summer of 1941, with the beginning of Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union? Or did it become truly global only when the Japanese brought the USA into the war at the end of 1941? And what of the long conflict in East Asia, beginning with the Japanese aggression in China in the early 1930s and only ending with the triumph of the Chinese Communists in 1949?

In The Oxford History of World War Two a team of leading historians re-assesses the conflict for a new generation, exploring the course of the war not just in terms of the Allied response but also from the viewpoint of the Axis aggressor states. Under Richard Overy’s expert editorial guidance, the contributions take us from the genesis of war, through the action in the major theatres of conflict by land, sea, and air, to assessments of fighting power and military and technical innovation, the economics of total war, the culture and propaganda of war, and the experience of war (and genocide) for both combatants and civilians, concluding with an account of the transition from World War to Cold War in the late 1940s. Together, they provide a stimulating and thought-provoking new interpretation of one of the most terrible and fascinating episodes in world history.

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A magisterial, one-volume history of political thought from Herodotus to the present, Ancient Athens to modern democracy – from author and professor Alan Ryan

This is a book about the answers that historians, philosophers, theologians, practising politicians and would-be revolutionaries have given to one question: how should human beings best govern themselves?

Almost every modern government claims to be democratic; but is democracy really the best way of organising our political life? Can we manage our own affairs at all? Should we even try? In the west, do we actually live in democracies? In this extraordinary book Alan Ryan engages with the great thinkers of the past to show us how vividly their ideas speak to us in today’s uncertain world.

ALAN RYAN was born in London in 1940 and taught for many years at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of New College and Reader in Politics. He was Professor of Politics at Princeton from 1988 to 1996, when he returned to Oxford to become Warden of New College and Professor of Political Theory until his retirement in 2009. His previous books include The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life and John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Reviews of On Politics:

‘An engaging and smart survey of major political thinkers … Through Ryan [they] speak directly to the present’ Mark Mazower, Prospect

‘Ryan’s book is a magnificent piece of work, clear (even when the ideas he’s exploring are obscure) and engaging (even when the theory in the original is forbidding) … anyone remotely interested in political theory will profit from reading or dipping into Ryan’s On Politics, whether this is their first acquaintance with the canon of political theory or whether they have been “Hobbing and Locking” for decades … It’s a remarkable experience’ Jeremy Waldron, New York Review of Books

‘Ambitiously and elegantly covers two and a half millennia of political thinking … despite covering huge intellectual terrain, [On Politics] a delight both when it explores detail and also when it draws conclusions of a broader perspective’ Justin Champion, BBC History Magazine

‘On Politics is crammed with smart observations and wise advice’ John Keane, Financial Times

‘An impressive achievement’ Economist

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Throughout medieval Europe, for hundreds of years, monarchy was the way that politics worked in most countries. This meant power was in the hands of a family – a dynasty; that politics was family politics; and political life was shaped by the births, marriages and deaths of the ruling family. How did the dynastic system cope with female rule, or pretenders to the throne? How did dynasties use names, the numbering of rulers and the visual display of heraldry to express their identity? And why did some royal families survive and thrive, while others did not? Drawing on a rich and memorable body of sources, this engaging and original history of dynastic power in Latin Christendom and Byzantium explores the role played by family dynamics and family consciousness in the politics of the royal and imperial dynasties of Europe. From royal marriages and the birth of sons, to female sovereigns, mistresses and wicked uncles, Robert Bartlett makes enthralling sense of the complex web of internal rivalries and loyalties of the ruling dynasties and casts fresh light on an essential feature of the medieval world.

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From the “preeminent historian of Reconstruction” (New York Times Book Review), the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period that shaped modern America.

Eric Foner’s “masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history” (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed.

Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves’ quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.

This “smart book of enormous strengths” (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.

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‘For the past half-century Frank Field has been an outstanding parliamentarian, social reformer and champion of the disadvantaged. He joined the Labour Party at the age of 16 and was expelled from it at the age of 78.’ -Brian & Rachel Griffiths

‘Frank Field is one of the most important, iconoclastic and remarkable politicians of his generation. This book is told with his Christian belief, regrets and all, and his trademark searing honesty.’ -Nick Timmins

In the increasingly dirty world of British politics, one man has stood out for unimpeachable integrity – the former Labour Member of Parliament for Birkenhead, Frank Field.

In this touching but also profound memoir, the veteran former Labour MP and social campaigner Frank Field reveals the poverty of his own childhood and the deep and lasting effect of his Christian socialism.

Field has spent his life fighting poverty in Britain, and has found allies on all sides of the political spectrum. In this book, Field talk about his activism, his foundational work with the Child Poverty Action Group and his work passing legislation for the Minimum Living Wage. He explains why he has dedicated his life to speaking out against the corruption of greed and power and writes with great alacrity about the titans of his political age, including Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. In the end, Field’s zeal for reform was too much for too many people, and, in 2015, he was deselected by his own local Labour party.

Politics, Poverty and Belief is an implicit indictment of modern British politics – the world of cash for questions, Partygate and all the rest – in which the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.

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‘History is made up of myths,’ writes the renowned Russian dissident journalist Mikhail Zygar. ‘Alas, our myths led us to the fascism of 2022. It is time to expose them.’ Drawing from his perilous career investigating the frontiers of the Russian empire, Zygar reveals how 350 years of propaganda, bad historical scholarship, folk tales and fantasy spurred his nation into war with Ukraine.

How did a German monk’s fear of the Ottoman Empire drive him to invent the fiction of a united Russian world? How did corny spy novels about a ‘Soviet James Bond’ inspire Vladimir Putin to join the KGB? How did Alexander Pushkin’s admiration for a poem by Lord Byron end with him slandering the legendary chief of the Cossacks? And how did Putin underestimate a rising TV comic named Volodymyr Zelensky, failing to see that his satire had become deadly serious, and that his country would be a joke no longer?

A noted expert on the Kremlin with unparalleled access to hundreds of players in the current conflict – from politicians to oligarchs, gangsters to comedians (not least Zelensky himself) – Zygar chronicles the power struggles from which today’s politics grew, and digs out the essential truths from behind layers of seductive legend. By surveying the strange, complex record of Russo-Ukrainian relations, War and Punishment reveals exactly how the largest nation on Earth lost its senses. A work of history can’t undo the past or transform the present, but sometimes it can shape the future.

In fact, that’s how the story begins.

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Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central mainstays of progressive politics: for many on the left, social justice consists of equitable distribution of wealth, power, and esteem among racial groups. But as Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue in this groundbreaking collection of essays, the emphasis seems to be tragically misplaced. Not only does a fixation with racial disparities distract from the pervasive influence of class―it actually legitimises economic inequality. Adolph Reed, Jr. is the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.” ―Cornel West “Walter Benn Michaels is cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, exhilarating to read.” ―Eric Lott “For decades, Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels have brought common as well as uncommon sense to the analysis of politics under oligarchic late capitalism.” ―Barbara J. Fields “Wokelords and anti-racist liberals will be frustrated, enraged, and defeated. This book pushes us closer towards the uncompromising, bare-knuckled anti-capitalist movement we so desperately need.” ―Cedric Johnson “An exhilarating journey that swaps the orthodoxies of contemporary progressive culture for a class politics rooted in universalism.” ―James Bloodworth “Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels have been among the clearest voices critiquing the dominant race reductionism in American intellectual life and proposing a real egalitarian alternative.” ―Bhaskar Sunkara “Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed, Jr. and Michaels have been arguing for decades.–Jodi Dean “These essays tell the story of the last seven decades, charting the decline of the left and American politics. The result is as rich as it is rare: a long view that is pressing and immediate.” ―Corey Robin “Reed, Jr. and Michaels take a hammer to common ways of thinking about race, class, inequality and identity, revealing ugly truths, and challenging us out of our comfort zones.” ―Kenan Malik

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