New Releases

Four days after Germany's surrender in May 1945, a young British officer took a jeep and headed east into Germany. But this was no ordinary soldier. Manfred Gans was searching for his family. As a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, Gans had fled to England. As soon as he could, he signed up to fight, serving in the legendary British 'Three Troop', an elite unit made up of German-speaking refugees, and joining in the D-Day Normandy landings. Working undercover, he obtained vital intelligence, helped liberate occupied France and the Netherlands, and saved countless lives on both sides of the front.

The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each—and, more broadly, between the five societies—has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth.

A lot has been written about the time contractor Raymond Davis spent in a Pakistani jail in 2011. Unfortunately, much of it is misleading—or downright false—information. Now, the man at the center of the controversy tells his side of the story for the very first time. In The Contractor: How I Landed in a Pakistani Prison and Ignited a Diplomatic Crisis, Davis offers an up-close and personal look at the 2011 incident in Lahore, Pakistan, that led to his imprisonment and the events that took place as diplomats on both sides of the bargaining table scrambled to get him out.

Willkommen im Regency, dem Übergang vom 18. ins 19. Jahrhundert! Ian Mortimer nimmt uns mit in diese kuriose Zeit, die für viele schlichtweg für Übermaß steht. Zwischen der leicht langweilig anmutenden Eleganz des 18. Jahrhunderts und der prüden moralischen Überlegenheit der Frühviktorianer wirkt diese Epoche liederlich, grell, gefährlich, schockierend und anstößig – doch dabei höchst unterhaltsam und anziehend. Es ist das Zeitalter von Jane Austen und den Dichtern der Romantik, der Gemälde von John Constable, der eleganten Kleidung von Beau Brummell und der poetischen Freiheit von Lord Byron.