Forty: 29 books

Concrete has been used in arches, vaults, and domes dating as far back as the Roman Empire. Today, it is everywhere—in our roads, bridges, sidewalks, walls, and architecture. For each person on the planet, nearly three tons of concrete are produced every year. Used almost universally in modern construction,...

The perfect guide to the British Army during the Second World War   ·          To encapsulate the British Army in one book is no easy task, but here, George Forty presents it as it was during World War II. When war was declared in 1939, the British Army was very much...

The personal story of a British tank sergeant's war, from the fall of France in 1940, through the bloody campaigns against Rommel's forces in North Africa, the hard-fought drive up Italy, D-Day and the battles for France and the low countries, and the invasion of the German heartland itself. George...

The United States Marine Corps has protected American interests in peace and war for over two hundred years, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. Following distinguished service in France in the First World War, the Marine Corps began to develop in earnest the doctrine, equipment, and organisation...

This is the story of General George S. Patton's magnificent Third Army as it advanced across Nazi-occupied Europe and into Hitler's redoubt in the last year of World War II. As America’s own answer to Blitzkrieg, Third Army’s actions from the Normandy coast across France and Germany to Austria...

Just as the Anglo-Canadian forces in the east found it difficult to advance beyond Caen after D-Day, so the US First Army laboured to advance through the Norman bocage country in the west. The lethal struggle that developed there was a defining episode in the Normandy campaign, and this photographic...

Caen, a D-Day objective on 6 June 1944, did not fall to the British and Canadian troops of Second Army until 6 August, by which time much of the city had been reduced to rubble. The two-month struggle was a crucial stage in the Normandy campaign and, as Simon Forty demonstrates in this photographic...

The greatest artist of the 18th century, Francisco de Goya began his career as an apprentice to a local artist where one of his jobs was adding draperies and modesty items to nude figures in religious paintings; for this he was titled “Reviser of Indecent Paintings.” But by the age of 40, Goya...

Rembrandt is indisputably the greatest artist of the seventeenth century, and many would say the greatest artist of all time. His mastery of composition, paint, and line—he was a superlative etcher—over a lifetime’s work has rarely been emulated, let alone surpassed. At a time when other artists...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was, above all, a painter of people, especially young women and rosy-cheeked children. In many ways, he is the most approachable Impressionist. Not for him were the grim realities of a hard life. Renoir painted people enjoying themselves: talking, flirting, laughing, often dancing,...

Many art historians consider Edouard Manet to be the father of modern art. Although often cited alongside the Impressionists, he was not a member of their group and never exhibited in their Salon des Réfusées. Instead, he pioneered a path between realism and impressionism, choosing contemporary...

Michelangelo is considered by many art experts to be the greatest Renaissance artist, surpassing even Leonardo da Vinci. Not only was he an exceptional sculptor but also a formidable painter, architect, and poet. Michelangelo’s primary material was marble and the results of his talent and work speak...

Painter of languid, elegant, Edwardian beauties and sharply dressed gentlemen, John Singer Sargent was the ultimate society painter. He knew everyone who was anyone and was on personal terms with many of them, including Edward VII and the U.S. presidents Roosevelt and Wilson. This social standing...

Comics entered their “golden age” in 1938 when a new idea revolutionized the industry: the creation of the first and archetypal superhero. Superman, pioneered by Detective Comics, better known as DC, was quickly followed by Batman, another brainchild of DC, in 1939. An explosion of acrobatic superheroes,...