Just over a decade after the first powered aeroplane flight, fearless pioneers were flying over the battlefields of France in flimsy biplanes. As more military aircraft took to the skies, they were equipped with weapons and their pilots began to deve...

British soldiers have been known as Tommies for centuries, but the name is particularly associated with the British soldier in World War I. In 1914, a small professional force of British soldiers crossed the Channel to aid the French. It soon became...

Ever since the first appearance of large-calibre guns in the Middle Ages, gunpowder artillery has had an enormous impact on military strategy and warfare. Cannons were initially developed to tackle fortifications, but then technology enabled the deve...

From the Middle Ages on the most precise shooters have been employed as marksmen or sharpshooters, and equipped with the best available weapons. The German states made the first serious use of sharpshooters on the battlefield during the Seven Years W...

Tanks made their first appearance on the battlefield in September 1916 and have captured the public imagination ever since. Other countries scrambled to develop tanks of their own, and by the time war broke out again in 1939, a wide variety of tanks,...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that whil...

Max Frisch (1911-1991) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in a...

This volume is a fully expanded and revised architectural guide to the greater part of Oxfordshire, based on Jennifer Sherwood's 1970s account, full of new information and with specially commissioned photography.The vernacular architecture of the vil...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

A compelling and lucid account of the life and teachings of a founder of rabbinic Judaism and one of the most beloved heroes of Jewish history. Born in the Land of Israel around the year 50 C.E., Rabbi Akiva was the greatest rabbi of his time and on...