True stories: general

John Bindon is a modern legend.

A Preston Chronicle newspaper headline in 1866 of 'Thievery, Knavery & Harlotry in Preston' described a town struggling with crime and its consequences.

This book brings to life a selection of the most notorious, and grimmest, murders and other crimes in and around Liverpool from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

How did the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) 'cavalry of the air' transform into the strategic RAF of the Cold War?

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Jarrow was a thriving shipbuilding town.

For nearly 100 years, the question has repeatedly been asked: who was 'Jack the Ripper'?

Monty Newton and Rodolphe Lemoine must be two of the most outrageous conmen in history.

A sensational new theory - and an insight into the late Victorian city through an intensively researched social history.

The first study, year by year, of murder in Britain in the 20th century.

The Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1953-58 organised and led by Sir Vivian Fuchs and supported by Sir Edmund Hillary was one of the most extraordinary exploits ever undertaken in Antarctica - but it has been underappreciated.

Bert Hannam was a dapper, charismatic figure in the Scotland Yard of the post-war years.

William Speirs Bruce was a Scottish nationalist and naturalist who led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902-04) as well as participating in or leading many other polar expeditions from 1892 through to 1919, particularly to Spitsbergen.

At the beginning of the Second World War Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Denmark and Norway, but left neutral Sweden alone.

Two elderly shopkeepers bludgeoned to death, the only evidence - a smudged thumbprint inside a cashbox.

Home-grown terrorists equipped by a foreign power are not a new phenomenon.

Nearly forty female agents were sent out by the French section of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War.

London had many places of execution: Tyburn, of course, but also Smithfield, Wapping, Kennington, Tower Hill and Charing Cross among others.

At the very beginning of the Second World War Germany invaded and occupied Belgium.

This book features fifty-six Victorian cases of murder covered in the sensational weekly penny journal the Illustrated Police News between 1867 and 1900.

Forgotten is an extraordinary blend of military and social history - a story that pays tribute to the valour of an all-black battalion whose crucial contributions at D-Day have gone unrecognised to this day.

Mrs Holmes tells the incredible story of Grace Humiston, the lawyer and detective who solved the famous cold case of Ruth Cruger, an 18-year-old girl who disappeared in 1917.

'Exhilarating and fascinating' KATY HESSEL | 'Rich and detailed' CHLO ASHBY | 'Enlightening' TABISH KHAN | 'Sheds light on an uncharted area of art history' JENNY PERY | 'An essential read' EDWARD BROOKE-HITCHINGMeet the unexpected, overlooked and forgotten models of art history.

Two aristocratic brothers executed for forgery in 1776; a young woman who spurned the advances of a one-legged admirer, battered to death in her Camden Town home in 1926; a pornographer shot dead by the Krays in 1966 for having 'too much lip' .

A rare and forgotten first-hand account of the first day of the Battle of the Somme by a British infantry soldier who went 'over the top' and survived.

Over 100 years ago Harry Harbord Morant (the Breaker) was shot by a firing squad in Pretoria.

Macabre crimes have long fascinated us, and our murky past ensures that we have no shortage of tales to chill and entertain in equal measure.

This is the first book to tell the story of the Sherlockian mystery that is the classic London Battersea Flat Murder.

Empire of Sin is a vibrant account of New Orleans in the early 1920s, a time when commercialised vice, jazz culture and endemic crime formed the background for a civil war that lasted for thirty years.

The source of the River Nile was one of the great mysteries of the Victorian age.

The journey that made Richard Burton famous as a traveller and explorer in the nineteenth century was a pilgrimage to Mecca, which he carried out disguised as a Pashtun tribesman from what is now north-western Pakistan or Afghanistan.

"e;It is hard to describe a nightmare adequately, unless you can say how the day had been before the night fell.

'And, as [the tigress] turned her head back, gazing towards the bearers, I aimed at her neck .

'The observer, wherever on the globe his eyes were turned, would have found no area immune from the struggle.

William Dampier - buccaneer, journalist, naturalist and explorer - once shocked and delighted the literary world with the scarcely credible tales of his voyages.

Few things are more evocative of Victorian Britain than its criminals; they are, together with railways, gas lamps and swirling fog, vital ingredients in any Victorian melodrama.

Liverpool has a deeply chequered past.

Very Special Agent Fifi was described as 'one of the most expert liars in the world'.

Smuggling in Cornwall: An Illustrated History tells the story of the smuggling trade that flourished in Cornwall during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

On the outbreak of the First World War, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to enlist in the military in order to set a good example to others, despite being fifty-five.

Edith Wharton, the author of classic novels including The Age of Innocence, was an American living in Paris when war broke out in 1914.

By the time of the First World War, nursing had become vital.

This book takes the reader, alongside Kipling, to the training camps of Kitchener's army in the south of England, to the lines of the French army and the villages just behind them, to sea with submarines, minesweepers and the big ships of Jutland, to the Alpine front between Italy and Austria-Hungary and alongside the Irish Guards as they fight in the first battles of the war in the summer of 1914.

The Who's Who of British Crime spans the whole twentieth century, and covers an enormous range of crimes and misdemeanours - by turns appalling, brilliant, gruesome and audacious.

Located in central England, the West Midlands is a distinctive industrial region encompassing numerous ancient towns and villages in a unique and diverse landscape, formed by centuries of mining and iron forging.

A look at the dark side of life, Victorian-style, when nothing was quite as it seemed and a public execution could be an entertaining family day out.

Georgi Kondakov was sixteen years old when he was brought to Alderney in August 1942 with about 1,000 other young Russians to build part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall defences.

As a young Army officer, Robert Baden-Powell was stationed in Malta as an aide to his uncle, General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth.

On 17 September 1921, the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton left London aboard his ship Quest, bound for the Antarctic on what would prove to be his final voyage.

'Mr Ponting has it in his power greatly to delight!

Revolt in the Desert is the extraordinary story of the war in Arabia between 1916 and 1918, written by one of the war's most extraordinary characters, Lawrence of Arabia.