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In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler's Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile-composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.

Ein verblichener Stoffpierrot, ein Medaillon – so schlicht und klein diese Objekte auch sein mögen, jedes birgt ein großes Geheimnis. Jedes wurde einst seinem Besitzer von den Nazis entrissen. Nun soll die Französin Irène sie im Auftrag der Arolsen Archive den Familien der Opfer zurückgeben. Über eine Nummer im Stoff stößt Irène auf den 15-jährigen Lazar, der Buchenwald überlebte und dessen Spur sich als junger Mann in Griechenland verliert. Und sie findet Unglaubliches über die Polin Wita heraus, die das Medaillon in Auschwitz bei sich trug.

When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles,” he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”

On 3 October 1987 Charlie Squadron – the iron fist of 61 Mechanised Battalion Group – led the way in a decisive battle on the Lomba River in southern Angola, as part of the South African Defence Force’s Operation Moduler. Although SADF tactical doctrine dictated that the tanks of the Angolan 47 Brigade be countered with tanks, the young conscripts of Charlie Squadron were forced to face their enemy in vastly inferior Ratels, significantly handicapped by the vehicles’ thin armour and low-velocity guns.

Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.

In terms of world history, the year 1815 is mainly remembered for the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. But something else happened that year which is now largely forgotten but which had a fundamental impact on the whole world in the years that followed. In April 1815, a volcano erupted on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia. The eruption itself was so powerful that it was audible thousands of miles away.

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true.

Łódź, primavera del 1947. Sul banco degli imputati della Corte Distrettuale siede Hans Biebow, nato a Brema nel 1902 e che, durante la guerra, era stato amministratore (Amtsleiter) del ghetto di Łódź. Lo stato polacco considera quest’uomo, alto, biondo e dagli occhi azzurri, come uno dei dieci peggiori criminali nazisti ancora in circolazione, al pari di Rudolf Höß (capo di Auschwitz), Arthur Greiser (Gauleiter del Warthegau) o Hans Frank (governatore del Governatorato Generale). Ma Biebow non era un militare e nemmeno un alto esponente del partito nazionalsocialista.

"Il conflitto tra israeliani e palestinesi in questi ultimi anni è di nuovo andato avvitandosi su di sé, dopo gli spiragli degli anni Novanta. Delle speranze trascorse rimane ben poco mentre delle antiche diffidenze tutto sembra essere stato riconfermato. Alla radice rimane il mancato riconoscimento reciproco, la tragica finzione per cui, affinché l'uno possa esistere, l'altro debba scomparire una volta per sempre". Una terra, due popoli, ma non ancora due Stati.

Sui monti di Sarzana, proprio lungo la Linea Gotica, dove nel 1944 i combattimenti infuriavano con maggiore ferocia, il capitano della marina tedesca Rudolf Jacobs, ottimo soldato, abbandonò le proprie fila. Non lo fece per fuggire da una guerra ormai persa, ma per unirsi ai partigiani garibaldini, fino a morire eroicamente durante l'assalto a una caserma delle Brigate nere fasciste. Apparentemente la sua sembra la storia di un'eccezione, commovente e coraggiosa, ma pur sempre un'eccezione rispetto alla nostra idea dei tedeschi zelanti combattenti della Germania nazista, fedeli fino al suo crollo.

The year was 2000. Sierra Leone, in West Africa, had been ravaged by years of civil strife. With the intervention of the United Nations, two companies of the Indian Army were deployed in Kailahun as part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission. Soon, the peaceful mission turned into a war-like standoff between Major Punia's company and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in Kailahun, with the Indian peacekeepers cordoned off for seventy-five days without supplies. The only way home was by laying down their weapons.

I Love Russia takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard. It is Elena Kostyuchenko’s courageous attempt to document Russia as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doc­tors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself. At once uncompromising and deeply humane, it stitches reportage and personal essays into a kaleidoscopic, often other-worldly journey. Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it.

Step back in time and explore the captivating battles, clans, highlanders, myths, and legends that have shaped Scotland from ancient times to the present day. Through vivid storytelling, you'll be transported to the heart of Scotland's past to discover the customs and traditions of its clans. From the fierce Highland warriors to the cunning Lowland politicians, and how their actions shaped Scotland's identity.

With the new edition of Unsettled, Steven Koonin draws on decades of experience—including as a top science advisor to the Obama administration—to clear away the fog and explain what science really says (and doesn’t say). With a new introduction, this edition now features reflections on an additional three years of eye-opening data, alternatives to unrealistic “net zero” solutions, global energy inequalities, and the energy crisis arising from the war in Ukraine.

This panoramic book shows how the Greek Revolution was a demographic upheaval more consequential than the overthrow of a ruler. Drawing on Ottoman sources together with archival evidence from Greece, Britain, France, Russia, and Switzerland, the book reframes the birth of modern Greece within the imperial history of the global nineteenth century.

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an escalation of the Russo-Ukraine conflict that began eight years earlier. But Russia’s recent rise on the world’s stage began long before that historic date. In Hubris, Jonathan Haslam, one of the world’s greatest experts on Russian foreign policy and espionage, examines one of the most intractable issues of our time.

Born in Zakroczym, Poland in 1927, Holocaust survivor Joe Engel was taken by the Nazis at fourteen and never saw his parents again. Now ninety years old, Joe is the embodiment of living history and spends his retirement years ensuring the Holocaust is never forgotten. With the assistance of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s film and photographic archives, filmmaker Ron Small has successfully weaved Joe’s incredible storytelling into a riveting audiobook presentation that is both historic and contemporary.

James Stourton tells the story of the London art market from the immediate postwar period to the turn of the millennium in engaging and fast-paced style, populating his richly entertaining narrative with a glorious rogues’ gallery of clever amateurs, eccentric scholars, brilliant emigrés, cockney traders and grandees with a flair for the deal.

Historians Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. These political changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.

This is a unique first-hand account of what it was like to be a Jewish refugee imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II. Its immediacy is what makes it such a valuable eyewitness account. While there are other memoirs written decades after internment, Walter Igersheimer wrote this book shortly after he was deported from Canada because the Liberal government in the 1940s did not want Jews to become Canadian citizens.