Diana Preston

After Julius Caesar's murder, his mistress Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, fled to Alexandria where she gave birth to their son. Civil war broke out in Rome, and Mark Antony, Caesar's friend, was given control over the East. Summoned to his headquarters, Cleopatra made her entry at dusk on a scented, candle-lit barge: and so began one of the greatest love stories of all time. The affair between the ancient world's most famous celebrity couple became all-consuming, leaving them oblivious to the threat of doom building up against them. Now Diana Preston has delved into the real history behind the propaganda and myth surrounding this famous couple, breathing new life into this epic love story.

In 1631, the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, ordered the construction of a monument of unsurpassed splendour and majesty in memory of his beloved wife. Theirs was an extraordinary story of passionate love and she bore him fourteen children. Mumtaz Mahal followed her husband on every military campaign, in order that they might never be apart. But then Mumtaz died in childbirth. Blinded by grief, Shah Jahan created an exquisite and extravagant memorial for her on the banks of the river Jumna. A gleaming mausoleum of flawless symmetry, the Taj Mahal was built from milk-white marble and rose sandstone, and studded with a fortune in precious jewels. It took twenty years to complete and involved over 20,000 labourers, depleting the Moghul treasuries. But Shah Jahan was to pay a greater price for his obsession. He ended his days imprisoned by his own son in Agra Fort, gazing across the river at the monument to his love. The building of the Taj Mahal had set brother against brother and son against father in a savage conflict that pushed the seventeenth century’s most powerful empire into irreversible decline.

On December 26, 1898, Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium and observed that "radioactivity seems to be an atomic property." Some 47 years later, her startling insight was on full and horrific display as "Little Boy" exploded over Hiroshima. Before the Fallout is the epic story of the intervening half century, during which an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world revealed the knowledge of how to destroy it, and an open, international, scientific adventure transmuted overnight into a wartime sprint for the bomb. Weaving together history, science, and biography, Diana Preston chronicles a fascinating human chain reaction of scientists, leaders, and ordinary citizens whose discoveries and decisions forever changed our lives. The early decades of the 20th century brought Einstein's relativity theory, Rutherford's discovery of the atomic nucleus, and Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, and scientists of many nations worked together to tease out the secrets of the atom. Only 12 years before Hiroshima, the great Ernest Rutherford dismissed the idea of harnessing energy from atoms as "moonshine." Then, on the eve of World War II, the power of atomic fission was revealed, alliances were broken, friendships were sundered, and science was co-opted by world events. Preston interviewed the surviving scientists, and she offers new insight into the fateful wartime meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr, along with a fascinating conclusion examining what might have happened had any number of events occurred differently. As the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima approaches, Before the Fallout compels us to consider the threats and moral dilemmas we face in our ever-dangerous world. - Jacket flap.

"At a time when surviving a voyage across the Pacific was cause for celebration, William Dampier journeyed three times around the world, sailing more than 200,000 miles in his lifetime and witnessing people, places, and phenomena no European had seen. As a young man he spent several years in the swashbuckling company of buccaneers in the Caribbean and Pacific, learning to survive in their bloodthirsty, uncertain world, before setting off on his first journey around the globe - a many-year odyssey, much of it spent in the theretofore mysterious Pacific and Southeast Asia. Later, his best-selling books about his experiences were a sensation; the vividness of his prose and accuracy of his descriptions put armchair readers in the midst of unknown worlds and introduced many words into the English language, including barbecue, chopsticks, and kumquat. Over time, Dampier's observations and insights influenced generations of scientists, explorers, and writers." "Dampier's powers of observation were astonishing. He was the first to deduce that winds cause currents and the first to produce wind maps across the world, surpassing even the work of Edmund Halley. His insights on land were equally astute: For example, he introduced the concept of the "sub-species" that Darwin later built into his theory of evolution, and his description of the breadfruit was the impetus for Captain Bligh's voyage on the Bounty. Dampier reached Australia eighty years before Cook, and he later led the first formal expedition of science and discovery back to Australia. So influential was Dampier that today he has more than one thousand entries in the Oxford English Dictionary."--BOOK JACKET.

An account of the World War I German torpedo attack on and sinking of the passenger liner, the Lusitania, describing the experiences of some of those involved.

"The Boxer Rebellion is a panoramic chronicle of the uprising and ensuing two-month siege of the eleven foreign ministries in Peking (now Beijing), and of the foreign community in Tientsin (now Tianjin), during the summer of 1900 - the repercussions of which have echoed throughout the intervening century. It left tens of thousands of Chinese dead, precipitated the end of dynastic rule in China, and has tainted China's relationship with the wider world to this day. It is also a richly human story.". "Relying on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of the defenders, and on her own extensive research from both Chinese and Western perspectives, Diana Preston portrays the dramatic human experience of the Boxer rising."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book tells the compelling and colourful story of the 1900 Boxer Rising in China which culminated in the siege of the eleven Foreign Legations in Peking, their relief by an international force sent up from Tientsin and the subsequent looting of the Forbidden City in Peking. Much of the story is told through eye-witness accounts which are vivid and often moving. The book also puts the story into the context of society and politics at the turn of the century - a time when old orders were being challenged. The book also shows how the Rebellion and the international reaction fit in with China's long standing and continuing troubled relationship with the outside world."--BOOK JACKET.

"Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization. Indeed, 9 convicts from the Australian penal colony, led by Mary Bryant, also traveled 3,250 miles across the open ocean and some uncharted seas to land at the same port Bligh had reached only months before. In this meticulously researched dual narrative of survival, acclaimed historian Diana Preston provides the background and context to explain the thrilling open-boat voyages each party survived and the Pacific Island nations each encountered on their journey to safety. Through this deep-dive, readers come to understand the Pacific Islands as they were and as they were perceived, and how these seemingly utopian lands became a place where mutineers, convicts, and eventually the natives themselves, were chained"--Provided by publisher.

The book begins with the first devastating battlefield use of lethal gas in World War I, and then investigates the stockpiling of biological weapons during World War II and in the decades afterward as well as the inhuman experiments conducted to test their effectiveness. This updated edition includes a new Introduction and a new final chapter exposing frightening developments in recent years, including the black market that emerged in chemical and biological weapons following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the acquisition of these weapons by various Third World states, the attempts of countries such as Iraq to build up arsenals, and the use of these weapons in terrorist attacks.

An account of the mid-nineteenth-century war in Afghanistan documents how the British government sought to protect regional interests by attempting to install a puppet ruler only to be defeated by united Afghanistan tribes.

On November 12, 1912, a rescue team trekking across Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier finally found what they sought -- the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scott's frozen body lay between those of two fellow explorers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of supplies that might have saved them. The remaining two members of the party were nowhere in sight, but Scott's eloquent diary revealed their nightmarishly similar fate. It is a story that continues to haunt the popular imagination, and which has never been told more grippingly or with greater compassion than in this book.