With the Middle East in a state of persistent change and upheaval, there has long been a need for a comprehensive, yet readable, study that can give the intelligent and interested ‘lay-person’ a greater understanding of this diverse, complex region.
Dorset magazine, February 2021
This book looks at some of the men who lost their lives but of whom there were no remains, and at the impact this must have had on the families who awaited news of their loved ones. The amazing thing is that the organisations who continue to search for these lost lives are still turning up information. Brilliant.
Books Monthly
I enjoyed reading these compelling stories of eight missing soldiers from the First World War. Their backgrounds, families and the sad circumstances of their deaths with no known grave are each sympathetically told so that it feels like you knew them. As the majority of the world was affected by this global conflict, this book also highlights the worries and hardships that most of our families must have experienced at the time. As such, this tells us some of what our own grandparents, great grandparents etc. must have gone through too.
Many books have been written about the life of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, yet there always seem to be corners of his long life that have remained unexplored. In this long look back into his early years, Constantinos Lagos and John Carr uncover hitherto unknown aspects of Philip s life as a Greek prince and his gradual transformation from a mere appendage of the troubled Greek royal family to an enduring pillar of the British monarchy. For the first time, Lagos and Carr delve into neglected Greek archives for a fascinating picture of Philip s early Greek life and the constant insecurity that dogged his steps as his father Prince Andrew of Greece and mother Princess Alice struggled to order their own lives in the maelstrom of unstable and often violent Greek politics in a Europe sliding towards world war. The Greek royal family, in which Philip has his roots, is dealt with at length, to bring out the particular family history and circumstances that played no small part in sh
Few accounts of the tank battles in the Western Desert during the Second World War have provided so vivid an evocation as Cyril Joly’s classic account Take These Men. In such inhospitable conditions, this was armoured warfare of a particularly difficult and dangerous kind.
From 1940 to 1943 battles raged back and forth as one side or the other gained the upper hand, only to lose it again. Often the obsolescent British armour was outnumbered by the Italians or outgunned by Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and frequently it suffered from the ineptitudes of higher command.
Cyril Joly’s first-hand narrative of these campaigns, highly praised when it was originally published in 1955, tells the story through the eyes of a young officer in the 7th Armoured Division, the famous Desert Rats. It describes in accurate, graphic detail the experience of tank warfare over seventy years ago, recalling the fortitude of the tank crews and their courage in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds.