War and history

A vivid and evocative collection of eyewitness accounts, diaries, reportage and scraps of memory from men, women and children who lived through the dark days of World War II.

A time which seems familiar to us today through film, but which was really another age, springs to life in the pages of Betty's Diary; funny, touching and unaffectedly vivid.

Part two in the brilliant Tremayne Tresco trilogy - a fictional account of one of Second World War's best kept secrets (1943 -1944)

Channel to Freedom, is the third part of the fictional trilogy, describing the role and operations of a naval Special Forces unit, based on Tresco, in the Isles of Scilly. It describes the part played in World War 2, by this ultra-secret unit, from D-Day until the end of the war in Europe. So secret was the real-life flotilla, that news of it was not released, under the Official Secrets Act, until 1995.Author

In May 1940 an aircraft crashed near the Women's Auxiliary Air Force quarters at Detling in Kent. Corporal Daphne Pearson rushed out and, though she knew there were bombs on board, roused the pilot and helped him to get clear. When they were thirty yards clear the bomb went off and she threw herself over the pilot to protect him from the blast. This is Daphne's story.

Ethel May Elvin, born when Edward VII was King in 1906, is one of the few remaining authentic voices of Edwardian working-class life. She tells Sue Taylor about her father's account of standing sentry at Queen Victoria's funeral, the privations and small pleasures of a working-class Edwardian childhood, growing up through the First World War and surviving the Second.

This thrilling fictional account is based on true events. Mike Williams, a surviving member of the SBO, has created characters that live on the page and brilliantly evoke the dangerous waters and desperate times in which the men and women lived - and sometimes lost- their lives.