IAN FLEMING THE COMPLETE MAN Winner of the 2024 CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global [...]

Six Minutes in May: how Churchill unexpectedly became Prime Minister (published on 5 October 2017) London, early May 1940: Britain is under threat of invasion and Neville Chamberlain’s government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking [...]

Priscilla, The Hidden Life of An Englishwoman in Wartime France, 2013. Priscilla was the author’s mysterious aunt, who lived on a mushroom farm in East Wittering, overlooking the Isle of Wight. The eldest daughter of the author and broadcaster S.P.B. Mais, she had spent the war in Occupied [...]

Under the Sun: the letters of Bruce Chatwin, 2010 Bruce Chatwin is one of the most significant British novelists and travel writers of our time. His books have become modern-day classics which defy categorisation, inspired by and reflecting his incredible journeys. Tragically, Chatwin’s compelling narrative voice was cut [...]

In Tasmania, 2004 (Tasmania Book Prize, 2006). In this fascinating history of two turbulent centuries in an apparently idyllic place, Shakespeare effortlessly weaves the history of this unique island with a kaleidoscope of stories featuring a cast of unlikely characters from Errol Flynn to the King of Iceland, [...]

Bruce Chatwin 1999 (Shortlisted Whitbread Book of the Year) Bruce Chatwin’s death from AIDS in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end, since he burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia. Chatwin himself was different things to different people: a [...]