In the 17th****century, only Moscow's elite had access to the magical, vibrant world of the theater.In Russia's Theatrical Past, Claudia Jensen, Ingrid Maier, Stepan Shamin, and Daniel C. Waugh mine Russian and Western archival sources to document the history of these productions as they developed at the court of the Russian tsar. Using such sources as European newspapers, diplomats' reports, foreign travel accounts, witness accounts, and payment records, ...

St. Louis was a city under siege during Prohibition. Seven different criminal gangs violently vied for control of the town�s illegal enterprises. Although their names (the Green Ones, the Pillow Gang, the Russo Gang, Egan�s Rats, the Hogan Gang, the Cuckoo Gang and the Shelton Gang) are familiar to many, their exploits have remained largely undocumented until now. Learn how an awkward gunshot wound gave the Pillow Gang its name and why Willie Russo�s bizarre midnight interview with a repor...

St. Louis was a city under siege during Prohibition. Seven different criminal gangs violently vied for control of the town's illegal enterprises. Although their names (the Green Ones, the Pillow Gang, the Russo Gang, Egan's Rats, the Hogan Gang, the Cuckoo Gang and the Shelton Gang) are familiar to many, their exploits have remained largely undocumented until now. Learn how an awkward gunshot wound gave the Pillow Gang its name and why Willie Russo's bizarre midnight interview with a repor...

From the Author of Off Color: The Violent History of Detroit’s Notorious Purple Gang It was the winter of 1919, and it was the height of a gang war the Motor City hadn’t seen before. Detroit’s Mafia family had split into two factions, both vying to not only avenge ancient wrongs but also gain control of the city’s lucrative illegal alcohol trade at the dawn of Prohibition. In Vìnnitta, author Daniel Waugh offers an in-depth account of the formation of the Detroit Mafia and how they grew fr...

The author wanted to write up his father's memoirs, but these were too short for publication, so he added his own autobiography, and was surprised to find a number of strange occurrences and coincidences in their lives, which seemed to be the hand of Destiny. The book reviews these events, which took place over One Hundred Years of British History, covering the upheavals of two World Wars and the dissolution of Britain's Colonial Empire, culminating in the Rhodesian Rebellion, and what Rho...

'The past is a foreign country' has become a truism, yet the past differs from the present in many unfamiliar ways and historical memory is extraordinarily imperfect. The degree to which we think of the European past as the history of France, Germany, Britain, Russia and so on, actually obstructs our view of former reality, and blunts our sensitivity to the ever-changing political landscape. Europe's past is littered with kingdoms, empires and republics which no longer exist but which were...

From the Ice Age to the Cold War, from Reykjavik to the Volga, from Minos to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Davies here tells the entire story of Europe in a single volume. It is the most ambitious history of the continent ever undertaken.

With three Military Crosses, three Croix de guerre, a L�gion d'honneur and a papal knighthood for his heroics during the Second World War, Sir Tommy Macpherson is the most decorated living soldier of the British Army.Yet for 65 years the Highlander's story has remained untold. Few know how, aged 21, he persuaded 23,000 SS soldiers of the feared Das Reich tank column to surrender, or how Tommy almost single-handedly stopped Tito's Yugoslavia annexing the whole of north-east Italy. T...

**“A writer of thrillers whose life is one, too . . . The man has lived an amazing life. Call it stranger than fiction.”—The Washington PostFrom the grand master of international suspense comes his most intriguing story ever—his own.**For more than forty years, Frederick Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels of intrigue, from The Day of the Jackal to The Odessa File and The Fox. Whether writing about the murky world of ...

A British infantryman shares his harrowing story of life on the frontlines of WWII, from the North African Campaign to the invasion of Germany.In April 1939, when Bill Cheall joined the famous Yorkshire infantry regiment known as the Green Howards, he could not have imagined the drama, trauma, rewards and anguish that awaited him. But he recounts it all here, in this vivid memoir of service and courage under fire.As a Green Howard, Cheall was on the receivin...

Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is on any art historian's list of the ten most important paintings ever made. Often referred to by the subject of its central panel, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it represents the fulcrum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also the most frequently stolen artwork of all time.Since its completion in 1432, this twelve-panel oil painting has been looted in three different wars, burned, dismembered, forged, smuggled, illegall...

The Struggle' is a very readable account of an interesting life. The author was born in a rather poor peasant family in Poland. Through his own effort he made his way into the elite, becoming an officer and a fighter pilot of the Polish Air Force. During World War II he was among thousands of Polish airmen who came to Britain to fight the Germans, eventually rising to command a fighter squadron. After the war he was among thousands of Poles who settled in Britain, unable to return to their...