Книги, похожие на «Jack Seward, Macneils of Tokyo»

A magisterial chronicle of the calamity that crippled Europe in 1914.1914: a year of unparalleled change. The year that diplomacy failed, Imperial Europe was thrown into its first modernised warfare and white-gloved soldiers rode in their masses across pastoral landscapes into the blaze of machine–guns. What followed were the costliest days of the entire War. But how had it happened?In Catastrophe: 1914 Max Hastings, best-selling author of the acclaimed All Hell Let Loose, answers at last how World War I could ever have begun. Ranging across Europe, from Paris to St. Petersberg, from Kings to corporals, Catastrophe 1914 traces how tensions across the continent kindled into a blaze of battles; not the stalemates of later trench-warfare but battles of movement and dash where Napoleonic tactics met with weapons from a newly industrialised age. A searing analysis of the power-brokering, vanity and bluff in the diplomatic maelstrom reveals who was responsible for the birth of this catastrophic world in arms. Mingling the experiences of humbler folk with the statesmen on whom their lives depended, Hastings asks: whose actions were justified?From the out-break of war through to its terrible making, and the bloody gambles in Sarajevo and Mons, Le Cateau, Marne and Tannenberg, this is the international story of World War I in its most severe and influential period. Published to coincide with its 100th Anniversary, Catastrophe: 1914 explains how and why this war, which shattered and changed the Western world for ever, was fought.

A rousing historical adventure from the bestselling author of ‘Prince of the Clouds’.As a boy, Nino Manes used to dash through the morning streets of his island fishing village to reach the church square before the first explosion of the Alborada, the fireworks that rang out over the bay to announce the dawning of a feast day.Now, years later as an Italian prisoner of war in a Texan camp at the end of World War II, Nino receives a letter from his love Zita, and finds himself facing a race against time of a different kind. For Zita tells him she is going to marry professor Barbaroux, their maths teacher – and Nino has only forty days to get back to the island and put a stop to the wedding. Taking his life in his hands, he escapes from the camp, vowing to get home before the marriage can take place.Idealistic and ambitious, Nino sets off on a breathless chase across the United States, and is soon joined on his odyssey by an enigmatic Lieutenant in the US Army, and a young prostitute. Together they face a series of extraordinary dangers, from wild forest animals to unexploded mines, and as their journey progresses, Nino finds himself assailed by doubts, questioning his own motives and those of the people around him.At once a romantic adventure and a thrilling wartime escape story, with a colourful cast of characters, ‘The Lights of Alborada’ is also the story of a spiritual quest and a heartrending exercise in nostalgia.