Bøker av The National Archives

For centuries, ships' commanders kept journals that recorded their missions. These included voyages of discovery to unknown lands, engagements in war and sea and general trade. Many of their logs, diaries and letters were lodged at The National Archives and give a vivid picture of the situations that they encountered.Entries range from Captain James Cook's notes of his discovery of the South Pacific and Australia, to logs of the great naval battles, such as Trafalgar and the Battle of the Nile. From the ships that attempted to stop piracy in the Caribbean, to the surgeons who recorded the health of the men they tended and naturalists who noted the exotic plants and animals they encountered, comes a fascinating picture of life at sea, richly illustrated with maps, drawings and facsimile documents found alongside the logs in the archives.

PRE-ORDER THE LATEST PUZZLING PHENOMENON NOWAfter Murdle comes Spydle... Following last year's bestselling phenomenon, The National Archives and Britain's leading puzzle writing duo, Dr Gareth Moore and Laura Jayne Ayres, have teamed up to produce a brand new puzzle book that promises to perplex and excite with tales of espionage and intrigue. Drawing on five centuries of British intelligence, spycraft and cryptography - from Sir Francis Walsingham's Elizabethan school of espionage and the interception of the Gunpowder Plot through to MI5 operations, cryptographers at Bletchley Park and Cold War agents - each puzzle will be inspired by real-life events and original records held at The National Archives, some only recently discovered, taking the reader on a tour that will educate, intrigue and leave them scratching their heads.

Exploring the experiences of prisoners and internees of the Second World War all around the world, through the records of The National Archives

A series of daring missions from World War II, revealed through letters and documents from the main protagonists.Winning World War II was about more than military force. It required guile, and tremendous acts of bravery by Special Forces and intelligence operatives who had the odds stacked against them. Using hundreds of documents and images from The National Archives, including some that have never been seen in print before, this book reveals some of World War II's most audacious missions.These include Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia in 1942, Operation Chariot, the attempt to damage the mighty German warship Tirpitz while she was in dock in St-Nazaire in France; and Operation Mincemeat, a complex plot whereby a corpse, replete with documentation designed to mislead the enemy, was dropped in southern Spain to spread misinformation.

Ever since humans began to live together in settlements they have felt the need to organize some kind of defense against potentially hostile neighbors. Many of the earliest city states were built as walled towns, and during the medieval era, stone castles were built both as symbols of the defenders'' strength and as protection against potential attack. The advent of cannon prompted fortifications to become lower, denser, and more complex, and the forts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could appear like snowflakes in their complexity and beautiful geometry. Without forts, the history of America could have taken a very different course, pirates could have sailed the seas unchecked, and Britain itself could have been successfully invaded. This book explains the history of human fortifications, and is beautifully illustrated using photographs, plans, drawings, and maps to explain why they were built, their various functions, and their immense historical legacy in laying the foundations of empire.

Letters, postcards, notes and telegraphs from the great and the good, the notorious and the downright wicked, shine a spotlight on a range of historical events and movements providing an immediate link to the immediate and much more distant past. The book includes letters from: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lucien Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Nelson Mandela, Caitlin Thomas, Mary Whitehouse, Gandhi, George Washington among many others. Subjects covered include suffragette disturbances, obscene publications, relations between international leaders, child emigration including the Kindertransport. The book features 55 letters, each with a 600-word essay, and a 3000 word introduction. There are 150 images in the book: 55 of the letters themselves, and a further 95 supplementary images.

Spies claim that theirs is the second oldest profession. Secret agents across time have had the same key tasks: looking and listening, getting the information they need, and smuggling it back home. Over the course of human history, some amazingly complex and imaginative tools have been created to help those working under the cloak of supreme secrecy. During World War II, British undercover agents were the heroes behind the scenes, playing a dangerous and sometimes deadly game--risking all to gather intelligence about their enemies. What did these agents have in their toolkits? What ingenious spy gadgets did they have up their sleeves? What devious tricks did they deploy to avoid detection? From the ingenious to the amusing, this highly visual book delves into espionage files that were long held top secret, revealing spycraft in action.