History

The Vasa – this ship is a national treasure about which there is still a great deal to tell. Here we are taken back to Stockholm in the 1620s. King Gustav II Adolf already had a lot of power, but wanted even more. He ordered the construction of the b ...

Buried about a foot or so down in the soil lay the carefully sorted remains of sixteen children and adults. They had lain there in the darkness since the Stone Age, surrounded by the most beautiful objects of their time in flint, bone and ceramics ar ...

This book is a colourful and thorough overview of vampires and ideas about vampires over the ages. The reader is taken on a journey from the blood-thirsty demons of Mesopotamia to the vampires in the TV series True Blood, as dangerous as they are sen ...

Two dear enemies, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, walked together down the Champs Elysées to the cheering of the crowds. A dream had come true. ‘Churchill is a gangster,’ de Gaulle had said just a few months earlier. And Churchill had given ...

During two years, the Soviet communist regime murdered, arrested and tortured Polish citizens in eastern Poland. The communists also deported about 320 000 Polish citizens from Eastern Poland to remote areas in the Soviet Union. Many of them perished ...

“Why do you dislike us Russians so much?” my good friend Nikolai asks me when I visit him in Moscow in December 2008. His question is justified – in Sweden we are again hearing demands that our defence forces must be built up to protect us from the ‘ ...

The country called the Soviet Union doesn’t exist any longer. But the people who were born there do. Journalist Torgny Hinnemo tells of meetings and episodes from forty years of travelling in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus/White Russia, Moldova, Centra ...

May 16, 1943. While the fading light of an early summer’s evening colours the flat Lincolnshire landscape, 19 Lancaster bomber planes and their crews take off from the RAF base at Scampton. The target: a decisive blow to the energy supply for the Ger ...

At dawn on the 22nd of June, 1941, the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. Hitler had been working towards this goal for a long time, and when the German armed forces surprised the Soviet defence, it looked as if his ambitions would soon be satisfied. ...

Was she the girl next door or one of history’s most gifted women? A profligate or a devoted mother? Or maybe all of them at once? One of the most fascinating figures in history, Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt (69–30 BCE) is among the few women of anci ...

It’s 1944, and American offensives are capturing one Pacific island after another. Pressed for time, Lieutenant-General Kuribayashi feverishly prepares Iwo Jima for an onslaught. “The enemy is about to land,” writes Kuribayashi. “The fighting will b ...

On the basis of unpublished witness accounts, documents from archives, memoirs and recent research, in With the courage of despair Mathias Forsberg and Artur Szulc tell the story of the Polish army’s desperate battles in September, 1939, and its cont ...

One of the most exciting unexplored areas on the planet is the Baltic Sea. It is the home of the remains of as many as 100,000 wrecks from more than one thousand years of seafaring and war. The Baltic Sea is unique on account of its low salinity gra ...

In June 1942, one of the strangest battles in military history took place off the Midway Islands. For the first time ever, two opposing forces went to battle without being in direct contact – the two fleets were located nearly 200 kilometres apart. T ...

Eastern Front, January 1944. When Operation Korzun was launched, it was the first time two Russian tank armies spearheaded an attack. The Soviet commander Konjev’s tactics were successful and 55,000 German soldiers were encircled. The Soviet version ...

At the end of the Second World War, Burma was considered one of the most promising countries in Southeast Asia, with enormous natural resources, an educated workforce, and a democratic constitution following a century of colonial rule. But the countr ...