Ryuji Nagatsuka did not know, when he made an application to become a pilot in October 1943, that by the following autumn Japan's situation in the war would be so critical that the role for which he was destined would be part of the most incomprehensible phenomenon of the hostilities - that of a suicide pilot, known to the world as a kamikaze.
On 30 April 1665, the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded the first rumours that the bubonic plague was spreading through London: 'Great fears of the sickness here in the City - God preserve us all!
The Writers' War is a collection of excerpts from outstanding accounts of the First World War, a terrifying conflict that would otherwise be beyond our ability to imagine.
Jack William Sweet relates shocking true events and personal stories which have terrified and horrified this seemingly placid county over the centuries.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, punishment was intended to be a short, sharp shock, often administered in public to discourage others from committing similar crimes.
Murders in Derbyshire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not, surprisingly, as numerous as those in other counties in the Midlands region.
At the onset of the Second World War, Frank Pleszak's father MikoAaj, aged nineteen, was forcibly removed from his family in Poland by the Russian secret police and exiled to the harshest of the Siberian labour camps, the dreaded Soviet gulags of Kolyma.
In relating the cases heard in the Courts of the County Assize in Gloucestershire nearly two centuries ago this book offers a variety of examples of the sins and sinners of those days, together with a fascinating insight into the consequences of those wrongdoings.
The personal story of a British tank sergeant's war, from the fall of France in 1940, through the bloody campaigns against Rommel's forces in North Africa, the hard-fought drive up Italy, D-Day and the battles for France and the low countries, and the invasion of the German heartland itself.
Death Ride From Fenchurch Street and Other Victorian Railway Murders offers a compelling account of the first murders to be committed on Britain's railways, at a time when the terrified screams of the victims were drowned out by the sound of the train's steam.
Covering an area from Liverpool to London, Canal Crimes explores the whole range of criminal activity on Britain's Waterways during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The mass migration of folk from the countryside to Bradford at the height of the Industrial Revolution resulted in large numbers of people existing in abject poverty, as thousands were housed in filthy and overcrowded rooms and cellar dwellings.
What Manfred von Richthofen was to Germany, Albert Ball was to Great Britain: each, at the time, was the star turn of his country and Richthofen would describe Ball as 'by far the best English flying man'.
In 1910 Cora Crippen, an unsuccessful music-hall artiste known as Belle Elmore, was murdered by her husband Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American quack doctor, at their London home.
The case of Jack the Ripper and his savage serial killing and horrendous mutilation of five women in the East End of Victorian London is the greatest of all unsolved murder mysteries.
Ripper Murders From Old Photographs is not a standard retelling of the story of the Whitechapel Murders but the tale of historically important photographs connected to the case, discovered by the author in 2007.
My life as an Explorer is a classic of Polar literature, written by the one man to do more to further the exploration of both Polar regions than any other person.
