Nigel Cawthorne: 90 books

In the heat and dust of the North African desert, British and Australian troops led by General Montgomery were waiting for an attack by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The defences they had prepared required the Germans to run the gauntlet between six pounder anti-tank guns and dug-in tanks. Montgomery...

Just sixteen minutes into D-Day and their glider had already crash-landed onto the field. Scrambling out to storm the bridge, the young British soldiers began the fight of their lives. Five miles inside enemy territory, they ran headlong into the day that shaped the twentieth century, paving the...

Under cover of the bombardment, the Germans blew gaps in the wire and cleared paths through the minefield. By the following morning, they had established a hole through the outer defences a mile and a half wide and taken more than 100 prisoners. Their charismatic leader, the dynamic Erwin Rommel,...

In the ruined houses, streets and sewers of Stalingrad there raged a ferocious hand-to-hand battle. The advancing Panzers proved vulnerable in the close quarter combat.  Resistance was to the death as Stalin ordered that the city that bore his name must be held at all costs. For the Germans,...

Born Josef Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia in 1879, the young Stalin studied to become a priest whilst secretly reading the works of Karl Marx. Politics was to become his religion and between 1902 and 1913 he was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia eight times, escaping on seven...

Vietnam was the longest war in American history. US ground troops and their Australian, New Zealand and Korean allies were committed there for eight long years. In all, the American commitment in Southeast Asia lasted 15 years. During that time over 46,000 US servicemen died in battle. The Australian...

Fighting Them on the Beaches tells the story of one of the largest and most meticulously organized seaborne invasions in the history of warfare - the Allied Landings of June 6, 1944: D-Day. As the parachutists and glider troops of the US and British airborne divisions went in on the night of June 5,...

The air war waged by the Luftwaffe agaon the RAF in the summer and autumn of 1940 was the key event of the World War II. If it had been lost, Hitler would have added the British Isles to his portfolio of subject nations. It was Churchill who coined the phrase 'Battle of Britain' to underscore the peril...

It didn't start with Clinton, or even Kennedy. Ever since the Father of our Country was sworn in over 200 years ago, the White House has seen its share of oversexed, adulterous, philandering presidents. From Washington's countless bed partners to Jefferson's illegitimate children, Kennedy's notorious...

How did a former Austrian corporal in the Bavarian army with no apparent gift for leadership or strategy become the leader of one of the most civilized countries in Europe and turn it into a nightmare state? This is an accessible, concise and penetrating analysis of Adolf Hitler, the most enigmatic figure...

London abounds with all manner of ludicrous laws, and not all of these curious statutes have been relegated to the past. Despite the efforts of the Law Commission there are medieval laws that are still in force, and the City of London and its livery companies have their own legal oddities. Laws are...

SHOCKING TRUE STORIES OF THE WORLD'S MOST BARBARIC CRIMINALSRevealing portraits of the most notorious killers of our time:•Jeffrey Dahmer•The Zodiac Killer•Dr. Harold Shipman•Son of Sam•The Columbine Killers•Charles Manson•The Night Stalker•The Yorkshire Ripper•Ted Bundy•Charles Starkweather•The...

100 Catastrophic Disasters is an astounding compendium of natural and man-made disasters. The range of entries is extraordinary, from the bizarre to the horrific, and from the heartbreaking to the ridiculous. The book includes some of history's most incredible disasters and tells in vivid detail the...

For a nation with a long and proud military tradition, one token stands above all others as a mark of recognition for the ultimate acts of individual feats of arms: the Victoria Cross. Awarded for one reason alone - to mark extreme acts of great heroism by British and Commonwealth servicemen in the...