Within Western culture, World War Two continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explanation is that it was the greatest and most terrible event in human history. Within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity. Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations which hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond...
Within Western culture, World War Two continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explan...
The sun never set upon the British Empire, its critics liked to say, because God didn't trust the British in the dark. The joke was a backhanded tribute to the astonishing achievement of the inhabitants of small island kingdom off the European mainland. Beginning in the 17th century with a few colonial settlements and trading posts clinging like barnacles to alien shores, and expanding dramatically thereafter by occupation and conquest, they created the greatest empire that the world had ever seen. In its Victorian heyday, when Britannia ruled the waves, it consisted of 58 countries with a...
The sun never set upon the British Empire, its critics liked to say, because God didn't trust the British in the dark. The joke was a backhanded tribu...
Throughout history, a handful of unusually driven individuals have been inspired to explore the limits of the known world, inspiring us and changing our perceptions of our planet through their courageous adventures. What is it that makes these men and women risk their lives in desperate, often fatal efforts to discover distant and inaccessible places? Robin Hanbury-Tenison, himself one of the most distinguished explorers of the 20th century, looks at the greatest of their kind in history, bringing their experiences to life in vivid and compelling anecdotes and drawing on their own...
Throughout history, a handful of unusually driven individuals have been inspired to explore the limits of the known world, inspiring us and changing o...
Ignorance about Islam runs deep in the West - ignorance of its rites, its beliefs, and above all its prophet. Who was Mohammad, the founder of Islam, and the man Muslims believe was God's last prophet on earth? In this concise and colorful account, the acclaimed writer and broadcaster Barnaby Rogerson tells the story of the illiterate orphan who was raised in the desert and trained as a merchant on the camel trade routes that criss-crossed Arabia, before defying his tribe to found a new religion, establish a world language, and create an almost unstoppable force that only 100 years after his...
Ignorance about Islam runs deep in the West - ignorance of its rites, its beliefs, and above all its prophet. Who was Mohammad, the founder of Islam, ...