Since its first publication in 1908, Scouting for Boys has been one of the best-selling books in the English language. Subtitled A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, the book draws on a miscellany of material, including Baden-Powell's own military experiences, and is credited with giving birth to the scout movement. The audio covers the topics of scoutcraft, tracking and observation, woodcraft, camp life, and first aid in addition to suggesting a range of scout activities and games.

"I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded. I have known what it was to be a poor man and I have known what it was to be fairly affluent. I have sampled every kind of human experience. I have known many of the most remarkable men of my time. I have had a long literary career after a medical training which gave me the MD of Edinburgh...I have traveled as Doctor to a whaler for seven months in the Arctic and afterwards in the West Coast of Africa." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Paul Dukes was sent into Russia in 1918, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, by ‘C’ (the mysterious head of the British secret service). His mission: to pull together the British spy networks operating against the new regime. With its spies and diplomats thrown out at the start of the Red Terror, Britain’s espionage efforts were left to a British businessman with no previous experience as a spy. Dukes operated under a variety of covers, the most daring of which was as a member of the Cheka secret police.

On VE Day in 1945, Edward Lyme was one of the many soldiers who thronged London's Piccadilly Circus to celebrate the end of the long war in Europe. Having been captured during the Defence of Calais in 1940, he had spent the previous five years in another sort of circus - the stalags of Germany and Poland. But Edward Lyme was not passive during his captivity and made several escapes. He scavenged for food and hid in barns - he was even incarcerated in a chimney for several days. One escape led him to finding himself nearly enrolled by a gang of Eastern European desperados.

The author of this book, Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, has, perhaps, achieved more renown in recent years than at any time since the publication of his literary efforts. Those familiar with the film Gettysburg will recall the unusual figure of a British Guards officer attired (inaccurately) in his full dress Guardsman's scarlet uniform among the ranks of the Virginians at the famous and pivotal battle.

In the year 1903 - the exact moment is now lost to history - Sherlock Holmes proclaimed to the world he was quitting England's Capital to go into retirement on a small, wind-swept farm in the Sussex South Downs. His shocked comrade-in-arms Dr. John H. Watson was later to write, "The decision took me utterly by surprise. I thought I had become an institution around Holmes, like his Stradivarius, or the old, oily black clay pipe and his index books." 

In the American Civil War, or the War between the States, three dashing cavalry leaders - Stuart, Forrest, and Mosby - so captured the public imagination that their exploits took on a glamour, which we associate - as did the writers of the time - with the deeds of the Waverley characters and the heroes of chivalry. Of the three leaders, Colonel John S. Mosby (1833 - 1916), was, perhaps, the most romantic figure. In the South, his dashing exploits made him one of the great heroes of the "Lost Cause". In the North, he was painted as the blackest of redoubtable scoundrels.

The Cooler King tells the astonishing story of William Ash, an American flier, who after being shot down in his Spitfire over France in early 1942 spent the rest of the war striving to escape from every prisoner of war camp in which he was incarcerated. It is a saga full of high drama, climaxing in a break out via a tunnel dug in the latrines of the Oflag XXIB prison camp in Poland.

Robert Graves first came across the name of Roger Lamb in 1914, when he was an English officer instructing his platoon in regimental history. Lamb was a British soldier who had served his king during the American War of Independent, and whose claim to a footnote in history is that he managed to escape twice from American prison camps.

In 1854, Victorian miners fought a deadly battle under the flag of the Southern Cross at the Eureka Stockade. Though brief and doomed to fail, the battle is legend in both our history and in the Australian mind. Henry Lawson wrote poems about it, its symbolic flag is still raised, and even the nineteenth-century visitor Mark Twain called it: "a strike for liberty". Was this rebellion a fledgling nation’s first attempt to assert its independence under colonial rule? Or was it merely rabble-rousing by unruly miners determined not to pay their taxes?

A British soldier walked over to the German front line to deliver newspapers; British women married to Germans became ‘enemy aliens’ in their own country; a high-ranking British POW discussed his own troops’ heroism with the Kaiser on the battlefield. Just three amazing stories of contact between the opposing sides in the Great War that eminent historian Richard van Emden has unearthed - incidents that show brutality, great humanity, and above all the bizarre nature of a conflict between two nations with long-standing ties of kinship and friendship.

Col. Mike Hoare describes how his 4 Commando supported Moise Tshombe's breakaway state of Katanga against both the UN forces, and the Baluba tribesmen who used poison arrows, pit traps, marijuana, spells, jungle drums...and even reorted to ritual torture and cannibalism.

At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes' lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work - and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it.

Catching all the fascination and humour of travel in out-of-the-way places, One's Company is Peter Fleming's account of his journey through Russia and Manchuria to China when he was Special Correspondent to The Times in the 1930s. Fleming spent seven months with the "object of investigating the Communist situation in South China" at a time when, as far as he knew, "no previous journey had been made to the anti-communist front by a foreigner", and on its publication in 1934, One's Company won widespread critical acclaim.

After a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in peacetime, the mysterious hero of Geoffrey Household's classic 1939 thriller Rogue Male goes undercover in the heart of Nazi Germany, scheming and planning for a second opportunity. With nothing to lose, the rogue male declares his own reckless private war, with no intention of taking prisoners.