Sinclair McKay

Narrative nonfiction account of the history of the Dresden Bombing, one of the most devastating attacks of World War II. Looks at the life of the city in the days before the attack, tracks each moment of the bombing, and considers the long period of reconstruction and recovery. reconstruction of this unthinkable terror from the points of view of the ordinary civilians: Margot Hille, an apprentice brewery worker; Gisela Reichelt, a ten-year-old schoolgirl;...

Following on from the enormous success of his bestseller, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, renowned author Sinclair McKay uncovers the story of what happened after the end of the Second World War. Once victory was declared, many of the individuals who had achieved the seemingly impossible at Bletchley Park by cracking the impenetrable Enigma codes and giving the Allies an invaluable insight directly into the Nazi war machine, moved on to GCHQ. This...

During the dark days of 1940, when Britain faced the might of Hitler's armed forces alone, the RAF played an integral role in winning the Battle of Britain against the Luftwaffe, thus ensuring the country's safety from invasion. The men and women of Fighter Command worked tirelessly in air bases scattered throughout the length and breadth of Britain to thwart the Nazi attacks; The Secret Life of Fighter Command tells their story. From setting up the...

Behind the celebrated code-breaking at Bletchley Park lies another secret…The men and women of the 'Y' (for Wireless') Service were sent out across the world to run listening stations from Gibraltar to Cairo, intercepting the German military's encrypted messages for decoding back at the now-famous Bletchley Park mansion. Such wartime postings were life-changing adventures – travel out by flying boat or Indian railways, snakes in filing cabinets...

Number 4 Euston Square was a respectable boarding house, well-kept and hospitable, like many others in Victorian London. But beneath this very ordinary veneer, there was a murderous darkness at its heart. On 8th May 1879, the corpse of former resident, Matilda Hacker, was uncovered by chance in the coal cellar. The investigation that followed this macabre discovery stripped bare the shadow-side of Victorian domesticity, throwing the lives of everyone...

A remarkable look at day-to-day life of the codebreakers whose clandestine efforts helped win World War II. Bletchley Park looked like any other sprawling country estate. In reality, however, it was the top-secret headquarters of Britain's Government Code and Cypher School-and the site where Germany's legendary Enigma code was finally cracked. There, the nation's most brilliant mathematical minds-including Alan Turing, whose discoveries at Bletchley...