It is more than two centuries since William Blake penned the lines we now know as Jerusalem. It took half that time before Hubert Parry wrote the soaring music that went with it. The book sets out the strange, spiritual history of the song which looks set to be England's new national anthem.

The capture of a working Enigma coding machine from the sinking U110 in May 1941, the pursuit of the battleship Bismarck later the same month, and the reason why British naval cryptographers won stole a march - when their own naval code had been cracked by the other side.

How did the British codebreakers succeed in cracking the apparently unbreakable Enigma code during the Second World War? Was it their gifted amateurism? The brilliance of Alan Turing? The invention of the very first computers? Or the pioneering work of Polish cryptographers? It was all of the above. But there is one other crucial factor, which is much less well known. The same team had done it before. The truth is that many of those most closely involved in cracking the Enigma code - Alistair Denniston, Frank Birch, Dilly Knox - had wrestled with German naval codes for most of the First World...

This is a manual about freelance writing with a difference. It won't tell you how to write or what to write. It doesn't set out to equip you for a brief period of freelancing. It will, on the other hand, tell you how to go about living a writer's life in a practical way - how to plan ahead, how to shape your career, how to find clients and how to deal with the money. It will tell you how to make a life out of writing without falling into the many little traps that are set for us once we embark on the idea. If you are thinking of changing your life, you may buy many other books about how to...

We have been through modernism. And post-modernism has already become the cultural norm - a sure sign that its power may be ebbing. But what is 'The Age To Come'? In this provocative, stimulating collection of essays David Boyle examines trends in the arts, business, academia and government to draw a map of the world our children will be living in. The way we all live our lives is dominated by sweeping philosophical trends covering culture, politics and morality. The age of post-modernism with its shiny, glitzy, ironic and media savvy jokes, fakery and moral relativism has been dominant for...

"We returned to our loved ones, but we were never the same again. Most were markedly changed. Young boys had become mature older men, aged beyond their years. All because of those days in the sea." For five days near the end of the Second World War, the USS Indianapolis disappeared from the map. After being hit by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine, the warship sank within twelve minutes: 900 men out of a crew of 1200 managed to jump free. But by the time they were found, all that time later, the survivors had plummeted to just 316 men. The story of how that happened, and how the few...

The extraordinary, untold story of the greatest piece of radio propaganda ever created - the V for Victory campaign - designed to shape a sense of resistance to Nazi rule in occupied Europe. It was propaganda made by amateurs but was so successful that Churchill and de Gaulle both adopted the V sign, and Goebbels had to hit back with his own V campaign. The book also explains how it was the BBC, without reference to higher authority, rejected Hitler's peace offer of July 1940, immediately and insultingly - to the horror of both the British and German foreign offices. At the start of 1941,...