Hanns Alexander was the son of a wealthy German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s. Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who became Kommandant of Auschwitz and oversaw the deaths of over a million people. In the aftermath of World War II, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen.

The story of the family who rose from the Frankfurt ghetto to become synonymous with wealth and power has been much mythologised. Yet half the Rothschilds, the women, remain virtually unknown. Natalie Livingstone follows the extraordinary lives of the English branch of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the 19th century to the early years of the 21st.

In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding travelled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a house by a lake. It had been a holiday home for her family, that she had been forced to leave as the Nazis swept to power. As he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived, he realised that this house had witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, had withstood the trauma of a world war and the dividing of a nation.

When Thomas Harding discovered that his mother's family had made money from the slave plantations worked by people of African descent, what began as an interrogation into the choices of his ancestors soon became a quest to learn more about Britain's role in slavery. It was a history that he knew surprisingly little about. In White Debt, Harding vividly brings to life the story of the uprising by enslaved people that took place in the British colony of Demerara (now Guyana) in the Caribbean in 1823.

June 2006: Allan Chappelow, an award-winning photographer and biographer, was found battered to death, partially burned and buried under four feet of paper at his house in Hampstead. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam - a man who claimed to be a key negotiator in the Tiananmen Square protests. Thomas Harding has spent the past two years investigating the case, described by the press as 'the greatest whodunnit' of recent years, and has unearthed shocking and revelatory new material on the killing.

They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into imposing enterprises and amassed spectacular fortunes. But despite possessing breathtaking wealth that rivaled the Astors and Rockefellers, they were barred by the gentile establishment from the lofty realm of "the 400," a register of New York's most elite, because of their religion and humble backgrounds.  

How did a bank, which boasts ‘we’re committed to helping protect the world’s financial system on which millions of people depend, by only doing business with customers who meet our high standards of transparency’ come to facilitate Mexico’s richest drug baron? And how did a bank that as recently as 2002 had been named ‘one of the best-run organisations in the world’ become so entwined with such a criminal? Too Big to Jail is an extraordinary story brilliantly told by writer, commentator, and former editor of The Independent.

Bright, attractive and well-connected, in any other family the Churchill sisters - Diana, Sarah, Marigold and Mary - would have shone. But they were not in any other family; they were Churchills, and neither they nor anyone else could ever forget it. From their father - ‘the greatest Englishman’ - to their brother, golden boy Randolph, to their eccentric and exciting cousins, the Mitford Girls, they were surrounded by a clan of larger-than-life characters which often saw them overlooked. 

The Ticket Collector from Belarus tells the remarkable story of two interwoven journeys. Ben-Zion Blustein and Andrei Sawoniuk were childhood companions in 1930s Domachevo, once a holiday and health resort in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then a struggling township in Belarus. During the events which followed its Nazi occupation in 1942, they became the bitterest of enemies. After the war, Ben-Zion made his way to Israel, and ‘Andrusha the bastard’ found work as a London Transport ticket collector.

In this landmark work, investigative journalist David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave labourers and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burnt around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how the wider world’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes.

March 1945. Allied troops are poised to cross the Rhine and sweep on into Germany. Victory is finally within their grasp. But if they believe this victory can be easily won, they face swift disillusionment. The final 100 days of the Second World War will prove to be bitterly and bloodily fought, village by village, town by town. Acclaimed military historian Peter Caddick-Adams brings this closing stage of the Allies' fight against Nazi Germany brilliantly to life. He explores the immense challenges they faced in crossing the Rhine on a 300-mile front. 

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions–Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis–an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. 

The Cartiers is the revealing tale of a jewelry dynasty - four generations, from revolutionary France to the 1970s. At its heart are the three Cartier brothers whose motto was "Never copy, only create" and who made their family firm internationally famous in the early days of the 20th century, thanks to their unique and complementary talents. Francesca Cartier Brickell, whose great-grandfather was the youngest of the brothers, has traveled the world researching her family’s history, discovering long-lost pieces of the puzzle along the way.

As governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. He spent three years hiding in the Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by the Vatican where he remained for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. 

During the first 17 years of his life, spent in Shanghai, Sam experienced wars, changing regimes, different currencies and a variety of schools that reflected the evolving political landscape. In a world obsessed with conflicting nationalism, his family survived as stateless residents, neither subject to, nor the responsibility of, any country. They were instead, sustained by their Russian Jewish culture and community. Through Sam's memories of early life and his love of history, we learn of Shanghai's uniqueness as a home and haven to thousands of Jews over many centuries.