The Secret Listeners

Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general listener of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their 80s - of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds, of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at code breaking, of the hijinks at nearby accommodation hostels - and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other’s work.

The codebreakers at Bletchley Park have been immortalised in films such as The Imitation Game and Enigma, but the Germans were also breaking Allied ciphers. The Third Reich Is Listening is the comprehensive account of the successes, failures and science of Germany's codebreaking and signals intelligence operations from 1935 to 1945. This fast-moving blend of modern history and popular science is told through colourful personal accounts of the Germans at the heart of the story.

The breaking of the Enigma machine is one of the most heroic stories of the Second World War and highlights the crucial work of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, which prevented Britain's certain defeat in 1941. But there was another German cipher machine, used by Hitler himself to convey messages to his top generals in the field. A machine more complex and secure than Enigma. A machine that could never be broken.

Bletchley 1945: a place where nearly 10,000 people would contribute decisively to the Allied war effort. Their role? To decode the Enigma cypher used by the Germans for high-level communications. It is an astonishing story. A melting pot of Oxbridge dons, maverick oddballs and more regular citizens worked night and day at Station X, as Bletchley Park was known, to derive intelligence information from German coded messages.

Historian and broadcaster Tessa Dunlop tells the story of the women of Bletchley Park through exclusive and unprecedented access to the women themselves. The Bletchley Girls weaves together the lives of 15 women who were all selected to work in Britain's most secret organisation - Bletchley Park. It is their story, told in their voices; Tessa met and talked to 15 veterans, often visiting them several times. Firm friendships were made as their epic journey unfolded on paper.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, a country house called The Firs in Buckinghamshire was requisitioned by the War Office. Sentries were posted at the entrance gates, and barbed wire was strung around the perimeter fence. To local villagers it looked like a prison camp. But the truth was far more sinister. This rambling Edwardian mansion had become home to an eccentric band of scientists, inventors and bluestockings. Their task was to build devastating new weaponry that could be used against the Nazis.

After the Second World War, many of the men and women who had worked at Bletchley Park moved on to GCHQ: the British government's new facility established to fight the KGB. The Spies of Winter explores the early years of GCHQ as it navigated its way through a tumultuous era - from the defection of the Cambridge Five and the treachery of atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs to the collapse of the British Empire and the emergence of the US as a superpower.

Through a stellar cast of politicians, diplomats, spies and soldiers, including T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, A Line in the Sand vividly tells the story of the short but crucial era when Britain and France ruled the Middle East. It explains exactly how the old antagonism between these two powers inflamed the more familiar modern rivalry between the Arabs and the Jews and ultimately led to war between the British and the French in 1941 and between the Arabs and the Jews in 1948.

As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for 12 of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins’s extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe.   

The thrilling true account of Hitler's first defeat. One of Britain's most remarkable victories of the Second World War. In the summer of 1940, the Nazi war machine was at its zenith. France, Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries were all under occupation after a series of lightning military campaigns. Only Britain stood in the way of the complete triumph of Nazi tyranny. But for the first time in the war, Hitler did not prevail. 

At Bletchley Park Tom Jericho, a brilliant young codebreaker, is facing a double nightmare. The Germans have unaccountably changed their U-boat Enigma code, threatening a massive Allied defeat. As suspicion grows that there may be a spy inside Bletchley, and Jericho is suspected, his girlfriend, the beautiful and mysterious Claire Romilly, suddenly disappears.

D-Day, 6 June 1944 was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit, aimed at convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the invasion force. The deception involved every branch of Allied wartime intelligence. But at its heart was the “Double Cross System”, a team of double agents controlled by the secret Twenty Committee.

A gripping tale of betrayal and counterbetrayal that tells the story of the most enigmatic member of the Cambridge spy ring - Donald Maclean. Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West's greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades. 

Preeminent military historian Max Hastings presents Winston Churchill as he has never been seen before. Winston Churchill was the greatest war leader Britain ever had. In 1940, the nation rallied behind him in an extraordinary fashion. But thereafter, argues Max Hastings, there was a deep divide between what Churchill wanted from the British people and their army, and what they were capable of delivering.

Examining the espionage and intelligence stories in World War II on a global basis, bringing together the British, American, German, Russian and Japanese histories. In The Secret War, Max Hastings examines the espionage and intelligence machines of all sides in World War II, and the impact of spies, code breakers and partisan operations on events.