Books

Ten crime and espionage novels by British, American, Belgian and Japanese authors published between 1928 and 1978 are in a new series from Penguin Random House, dressed in their signature vintage look with green-and-black-and-white paperback covers, the originals of which are now very collectable, ...

In the almost six years of war with Germany, September 3, 1939 to May 8, 1945, London was "the greatest target in the world”, as Winston Churchill described it. The unmissable bullseye was under sustained, sometimes unrelenting, aerial bombardment by night and day. While ...

Having a stroll in Nagykovacsi village recently, I walked past a house with a replica “Abbey Road” street sign on the front fence. A souvenir of a nice little trip to London, no doubt, and surely the homeowner/s took the Tube to St John’s ...

Author Paul Beaver first met famed flier Eric “Winkle” Brown in 1978, developing a close friendship that spanned almost 40 years. In 2009 Brown agreed to let Beaver write his biography with access to his archive, but with the strict caveat that it would ...

Surprisingly, surely, “the most astonishing murder ring in history” merits a mere three lines in Wikipedia – “ Nagyrév is a village in Jasz-Nagykun-Szolnok, central Hungary. It was the location of the Nagyrév culture. Between 1914 and 1929, a small group of female villagers ...

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea, is the most notoriously secretive and cut-off nation on Earth. Since its founding in 1948, it has neither been a democracy nor a republic, but rather has existed as a totalitarian hereditary kingdom where even ...

The Irish Republican Army’s attempt to assassinate British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher very nearly succeeded when their bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, at 2.54am on October 12, 1984, the final day of the Conservative Party annual conference. Author Carroll profiles the protagonists ...

Historian and journalist Katja Hoyer's fat book offers an overflowing history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), better known as East Germany, integrating just about every fact we might need to know with first-hand accounts from citizens about how they experienced the four decades ...

Georges Simenon could be a subtle writer. Take the very first words of this novel – “He was walking. For at least three kilometres, he was alone on the road across which tree trunks cast oblique shadows every ten metres, and he strode on, ...

Rock history offers the established facts that “The Dark Side of the Moon” album from 1973 is Pink Floyd’s masterpiece, a hi-fi buff’s dream with some 50 million copies sold, a number surpassed by very few others. For the true Floyd fan, it can ...