This edition does not include illustrations.The authorised biography of the great naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell, who died aged seventy in January 1995 in Jersey, where he founded the zoo he’d dreamed of as a small boy and pioneered the captive breeding of animals for conservation.Gerald Durrell was a world-famous naturalist and popular author who wrote, in all, some thirty-seven immensely readable yarns, including the bestselling ‘My Family and Other Animals...

Gavin Maxwell was a romantic, self-destructive, aristocratic adventurer who worked as secret agent, shark fisherman, racing driver, poet and travel writer. His books on Iraq, Sicily and Morocco were acclaimed, but his fame as a writer rested on his bestselling story of the otters he raised and lived with in a remote cottage on the west coast of Scotland, Ring of Bright Water. Maxwell's private life was every bit as turbulent. His essential homosexuality was masked by the love of a number o...

In 1945, as Allied bombers continued their final pounding of Berlin, the panicking Nazis began moving the assets of the Reichsbank south for safekeeping. Vast trainloads of gold and currency were evacuated from the doomed capital of Hitler's 'Thousand-year Reich'.Nazi Gold is the real-life story of the theft of that fabulous treasure - worth some 2,500,000,000 at the time of the original investigation. It is also the story of a mystery and attempted whitewash in an America...

Of all the extraordinary individual accounts that have come out of the Second World War and its aftermath, few can compare with that of Eric Pleasants, a member of the 'bastard' British wing of Hitler's SS - the British Free Corps. In this compelling autobiography, Pleasants writes of the bizarre and traumatic years he spent as a prisoner of the twentieth century's most notorious dictators.A life-long pacifist, Pleasants spent the early years of the war on occupied Jersey. He was i...

This book will entertain you; make you laugh; inform you; and, sometimes, make you squirm. It is a book that can be dipped into when you have a few spare moments and take you on amazing adventures to the ends of the earth.The inspiration for this book is Dermot and Mary Douglas’ itchy feet, which have brought them to places both close and remote – from Achill, to the Amazon rainforests, to the Galapagos Islands. It is a book of self-contained stories, written with humour, affection...