Brian Lavery

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich houses the largest collection of scale ship models in the world, many of which are official, contemporary artefacts made by the craftsmen of the navy or the shipbuilders themselves, and ranging from the mid seventeenth century to the present day. As such they represent a three-dimensional archive of unique importance and authority. Treated as historical evidence, they offer more detail than even the best plans,...

No defense minister in modern times had faced the challenges that Winston Churchill did during the Second World War. Fortunately, he had a unique and intimate inside knowledge of all three services, which allowed him to assess their real needs-a crucial task when money, material resources, and, especially, manpower were reaching their limits. Churchill Warrior looks at how Churchill gained his unique insight into war strategy and administration through...

May 2015 sees the 250th anniversary of the launch of HMS Victory, the ship that is so closely associated with Nelson and his great victory at Trafalgar and which, still extant, has today become the embodiment of the great Age of Sail. Many books have been written about Victory but none like this, which tells the full story of the ship since she first took to the waters in May 1765. It contains many surprises that she was almost wrecked on her launch;...

Winter 1968. Three Hull trawlers sink. One fishwife vows to change the law. A powerful story of death and survival. In the harsh Arctic seas of 1968, three trawlers from Hull's fleet sank in just three weeks. 58 men died. Lillian Bilocca put down her filleting knife, wrote a petition, and stormed into action. With her army of fishwives she took her battle to the docks and led a raid on Parliament. They changed the shipping laws, 'Big Lil' became an...

Spans five thousand years of the ocean's history to tell the stories of the courageous individuals who sailed the seas for trade, to conquer new lands, and to explore the unknown, from the early Polynesians to the first circumnavigations by the Portuguese and the British.