On September 13th 1943, two young British officers seized the chance to escape their PoW convoy after the capitulation of Italy. This catapulted them onto a two-month, seven-hundred-mile journey through enemy territory down the spine of Italy, helped by many brave local families. This new edition of The Long Walk Home sets the record of this extraordinary adventure straight. It gives Frank Simms equal billing as author, something that was denied him by the tragic early death of his compani...

A wholly charming, sweetly funny story of one young good-hearted Italian man. It's about life, bicycles, the joy of the journey and the simple beauty of a life well-lived.'Witty, moving and profound, this is the most enjoyable story I have read this year; a book to be treasured.' toowoomba ChronicleLuigi's Freedom Ride is a charming treat of a novel - as sunny, light and enjoyable as a strawberry gelato eaten in an Italian piazza on a summer's day....

A covert agent's memoir of three perilous missions in Nazi-occupied Paris, told with "unconditional honesty" ( Kirkus Reviews).At first, John Goldsmith's services were consistently refused. But in 1942, he was recruited into Buckmasters F Section of the Special Operations Executive—and his wartime exploits would be remarkable.His faultless French and upbringing in Paris were to prove invaluable. After intensive training he was parachuted into France ...

The legendary British Army officer recounts his experiences in the Boer War and both World Wars in this memoir with a foreword by Winston Churchill.Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart had one of the most extraordinary military careers in the history of the British Army. His gallantry in combat won him a Victoria Cross and a Distinguished Service Order, as well as an eyepatch and an empty sleeve. His autobiography is one of the most remarkable of military m...

It is 1915 and the Great War has been raging for a year, when Edward Rowbotham, a coal miner from the Midlands, volunteers for Kitchener's Army. Drafted into the newly-formed Machine Gun Corps, he is sent to fight in places whose names will forever be associated with mud and blood and sacrifice: Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele. He is one of the 'lucky' ones, winning the Military Medal for bravery and surviving more than two-and-a-half years of the terrible slaughter th...

The classic memoir of the Italian city left in chaos by the Nazis is "[a] masterpiece . . . elegiac and furious, and frequently hilarious" ( The New York Times)."Vivid, lucid, elegant, often funny," Naples '44 is the starkly human account of the true cost of war as seen through the eyes of a young, untested man who would never again look at his world the same way ( The New York Times Book Review).With his gift for linguistics, Nor...

Once a Hussar is a vivid account of the wartime experiences of Ray Ellis, a gunner who in later life recorded this well-written, candid, and perceptive memoir of the conflict he knew as a young man seventy years ago.As an impressionable teenager, filled with national pride, he was eager to join the army and fight for his country. He enlisted in the South Notts Hussars at the beginning of the Second World War and started a journey that would take him through fierce fighting...

In October 1942, Keith Douglas — a twenty-two-year-old poet serving as a tank commander with the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry — drove against orders to rejoin his regiment at El Alamein. What he found there, and in the weeks that followed as the Eighth Army pursued Rommel across the North African desert, became Alamein to Zem Zem: a prose memoir as vivid, unsparing, and strangely beautiful as anything to emerge from the Second World War.Douglas writes not as a soldier explain...

Alfred Burrages War is War is his sincere and successful attempt to record his experiences as a private soldier in France during the First World War, his reactions to abnormal conditions and his observations.Written in the 1920s he wanted the curious to know what war was really like. Burrage realized that nearly all such memoirs were written by ex-officers who inevitably saw the war from a different view point to Tommy Atkins as he put it, the officers were only with us, not of us, and the...

Sep 1939 - 27 Apr 1941'Between your body and his,' the old Arab woman told the lovely Greek-ltalian girl, Daphnis, 'lies the Sword of Fate.'In the battle-scarred days of 1940 Julian Day finds himself in Alexandria – in a whirlpool of intrigue and spy-rings. He falls under suspicion both from his fellow countrymen and the Germans. Driven by conflicting loyalties, he sets sail for Greece and the ill-starred campaign of 1941, and, determined to sheath the Sword...

This WWII memoir offers a vivid chronicle of combat in Egypt with the 107th Royal Horse Artillery and a daring escape from an Italian POW camp.When the Second World War broke out, Ray Ellis was a patriotic teenager eager to serve his country. Once a Hussar is Ellis's gripping account of his wartime experiences. A gunner for the 107th RHA, South Notts Hussars, he fought in the Western Desert Campaign and distinguished himself as the last soldier to fire on advancing...

A collection of writing from Britain's best-loved travel writer, ‘A Merry Dance around the World’ is the culmination of a lifetime of adventure.A collection of writing from eleven books by Britain's best-loved travel writer, A Merry Dance around the World is the culmination of a lifetime's adventures, from the birth of Eric Newby in 1919 at the 'ghastly hour' of 3.45am, to Herculean cycling escapades in his seventies through the wiles of the Irish winter. An astonishing catalogue o...