The First World War, now a century ago, still shapes the world in which we live. This volume brings together essays by distinguished historians, covering the war's causes and consequences; strategy and tactics; and its political and human legacies.

A character-driven account of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, an Anglo-American clash over military strategy that produced a winning plan when World War II could have gone either way. Churchill called it the most important Allied conclave of the war. Until now, it has never been explored in a full-length book. In a secret, no-holds-barred, ten-day debate in a Moroccan warzone, protected by British marines and elite American troops, Franklin...

Everyone has heard of the KGB, but little has been published about its 'daughter' organisations through which Moscow terrorised the satellite states grabbed by Stalin during and after the Second World War. Staffed by Moscow-trained nationals closely monitored by KGB 'ambassadors', Poland's UB, the Czech StB, the Hungarian AVH, Romania's Securitate, Bulgaria's KDS and the ultra-Stalinist Stasi of the German Democratic Republic all repressed democratic...

The biography of the 1982 Nobel Laureate in Literature tells the story of Márquez, a young man who rose from obscure provincial journalist to progenitor of a new literature.

"A thrilling narrative of scientific triumph-and the unimaginable, world-ending peril it brought us. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom, the United States marshaled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction with unimaginable explosive power. It would begin with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured by humans. In a matter of months, a city designed to...

What do the Trojan Horse, Piltdown Man, Keely Motor Company, and Ponzi Scheme have in common? They were all famous hoaxes, carefully designed and bolstered with false evidence.