Cairo, 1942: If you had asked a British officer who Colonel Clarke was, they would have been able to point him out: always ready with a drink and a story, he was a well-known figure in the local bars. If you then asked what he did, you would have less success. Those who knew didn't tell, and almost no one really knew at all.Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. Its components? Rumour, stagecraft, a sense of fun. Its target? The mind of Erwin Rommel, Hitler's...

You may not recognise the phrase, but if you have ever picked up a paper you'll have come across 'journalese'. Essentially, it covers words and phrases that are only found in newspapers - whether tabloid or broadsheet. Without them, how would our intrepid journalists be able to describe a world in which late-night revellers go on booze-fuelled rampages, where tots in peril are saved by have-a-go heroes, and where troubled stars lash out in foul-mouthed tirades? When Rob Hutton began collec...

How do you apologise when you're not sorry? Where can you make a fortune out of pretending to know the future? What's the best way to steal credit and avoid blame? These are the vital life skills that people need if they're going to make their way in the world. And they all involve one ingredient: flannel, the art of not saying what you mean. It's not exactly lying, but it's definitely not telling the truth. In Romps, Tots and Boffins, Robert Hutton brilliantly 'laid bare' the true meaning...

**A new game is afoot . . .Sherlock Holmes’s No. 1 fan attempts to solve a murder - and drags his reluctant flat-mate with him, in the feelgood mystery of the Summer.**Sycamore Bell is obsessed with the world’s greatest (fictional) detective, and loves his job: answering the letters that arrive addressed to his hero at his employer’s Baker Street address.Then a young girl writes from Texas begging Sherlock Holmes to save her father from death row, and Sycam...

Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the United States, but most critical discussions of the period still focus on books from prominent creators such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Art Spiegelman, eclipsing the work of others who also played a key role in shaping comics as we know them today. The Other 1980s offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this robust era of ambitious comics publishing....

'Highly readable' Ben Macintyre'Pacy, original and frequently chilling' Henry HemmingJune 1940. Britain is Europe's final bastion of freedom - and Hitler's next target. But not everyone fears a Nazi invasion. In factories, offices and suburban homes are men and women determined to do all they can to hasten it.Throughout the Second World War, Britain's defence against the enemy within was Eric Roberts, a former bank clerk from Epsom. ...

**A new game is afoot . . .Sherlock Holmes’s No. 1 fan attempts to solve a murder - and drags his reluctant flat-mate with him, in the feelgood mystery of the Summer.**Sycamore Bell is obsessed with the world’s greatest (fictional) detective, and loves his job: answering the letters that arrive addressed to his hero at his employer’s Baker Street address.Then a young girl writes from Texas begging Sherlock Holmes to save her father from death row, and Sycam...

June 1940. Britain is Europe's final bastion of freedom - and Hitler's next target. But not everyone fears a Nazi invasion. In factories, offices and suburban homes are men and women determined to do all they can to hasten it.Throughout the Second World War, Britain's defence against the enemy within was Eric Roberts, a former bank clerk from Epsom. Equipped with an extraordinary ability to make people trust him, he was recruited into the shadowy world of espionage by the great spy...

Cairo, 1942: If you had asked a British officer who Colonel Clarke was, they would have been able to point him out: always ready with a drink and a story, he was a well-known figure in the local bars. If you then asked what he did, you would have less success. Those who knew didn't tell, and almost no one really knew at all.Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. Its components? Rumour, stagecraft, a sense of fun. Its target? The mind of Erwin Rommel, Hitler's...

Napoleon warned 'Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world'. Lawrence James's magisterial history analyses the relationship between Britain and China between the beginning of the Opium Wars in 1839 and the transfer of power in Hong Kong in 1997.THE LION AND THE DRAGON reveals the part that Britain played in the awakening of China, then covers relations between the two countries during the period when an aroused China did indeed shake the world. Lawrence James also f...

Pomerantsev is emerging as the pre-eminent war reporter of our time. ObserverFrom one of our leading experts on disinformation, the incredible true story of the complex and largely forgotten WWII propagandist Sefton Delmer - and what we can learn from him today.In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat the powerful Nazi propaganda machine, which crowed victory and smeared its ene...

What makes the English English? Is it their eccentricity, their passionate love (or, indeed, hatred) of Marmite – or is it something less easily defined?Beginning at the top of a muddy Gloucestershire slope at the Coopers Hill cheese-rolling contest and traversing a landscape of lawns and queues, coastlines and sporting arenas, Ben Fogle takes us on a journey through the peculiarly English: a country of wax jackets, cricket, boat races and jellied eels, by way of n...