DIANA PRESTON

On November 12, 1912, a rescue team trekking across Antarcticas Great Ice Barrier finally found what they sought - the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scotts frozen body lay between the bodies of two fellow explorers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of supplies which might have saved them.Why did Scotts meticulously laid plans finally end in disaster, while his rival, Norwegian Roald Amundsen, returned safely home with his crew after attaining the Pole only days before the British team?In a newly revised and updated version of her original book, Diana Preston, returns to Antarctica and explores why Scotts carefully planned expedition failed, ending in tragedy.

Meticulously researched and vividly written, Eight Days at Yalta is a remarkable work of intense historical drama.In the last winter of the Second World War, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin arrived in the Crimean resort of Yalta. Over eight days of bargaining, bombast and intermittent bonhomie they decided on the conduct of the final stages of the war against Germany, on how a defeated and occupied Germany should be governed, on the constitution of the nascent United Nations and on spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Greece.Only three months later, less than a week after the German surrender, Roosevelt was dead and Churchill was writing to the new President, Harry S. Truman, of an iron curtain that was now drawn down upon [the Soviets] front. Diana Preston chronicles eight days that created the post-war world, revealing Roosevelts determination to bring about the dissolution of the British Empire and Churchills conviction that he and the dying President would run rings round the Soviet premier. But Stalin monitored everything they said and made only paper concessions, while his territorial ambitions would soon result in the imposition of Communism throughout Eastern Europe.

In 44 bc, Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March. His mistress, Cleopatra of Egypt, fled back to Alexandria with their little son. Mark Antony, Caesars friend and henchman, who, according to some accounts, was already besotted by the beautiful Cleopatra, took up her sons case before the Senate. But they refused to recognize him as one of Caesars heirs.Civil war broke out, and after the defeat of Caesars murderers, Antony took control over the East. Summoned to his headquarters in present-day Turkey, Cleopatra made her entry at dusk on a scented, candlelit barge: and so began one of the greatest love stories of all time - an eleven-year love affair that created the ancient worlds most famous celebrity couple. The affair became all-consuming and fired the lovers with the ambition to create a new order. Had they succeeded, our world today might have been very different.Filled with murder, intrigue, civil war and great battles, the tragedy of Cleopatra and Antony has fascinated the world for two millennia, and has been depicted by everyone from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the iconic 1960s film.Now Diana Preston has gone back to the original sources and delved into the real history behind the propaganda and the myth, to breathe new life into this epic love story.

Spanning fifty years, Before the Fall-Out tells the full story of how an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world produced the knowledge of how to destroy it.And of how a scientific adventure shared openly between nuclear physicists from many different nations transmuted into a secretive wartime race for the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - the atom bomb.As much as on the science, Before the Fall-Out focuses on the human chain reaction - the intertwined lives of the many scientists of many nations whose compulsive curiosity led, however unwittingly, ultimately to Hiroshima. In her page-turning account Diana Preston reveals how individuals responded to events - from Allied scientists debating the morality of deploying the bomb, to Japanese civilians who became its first victims, and to a German chemist working on the Nazi bomb project while concealing a Jewish pianist in his Berlin apartment. Diana Preston draws on fresh material including interviews with the last living scientist to have worked with Marie Curie, the only senior scientist to have walked out on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, and the German scientist who accompanied Werner Heisenberg on his controversial wartime visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.A Manhattan Project scientist said that the only secret of the bomb was that it could be made: once this was known, any nation could replicate it. Before the Fall-Out helps us make better sense of our own, dangerous world and of the threats and moral dilemmas that face our society today.

William Dampier, (1651-1715), was an English adventurer and pirate who preyed on ships on the Spanish Main. Poor and ill-educated and determined to make his fortune, he nonetheless had a passion for exploration and scientific research. Dampier was the first to map the winds and currents of the worlds oceans; led the first recorded party of Englishmen to set foot on Australia - 80 years before Cook; wrote about Galapagos wildlife 150 years before Darwin, who drew on Dampiers notes in his own work; was the first travel writer: A NEW VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD was instant bestseller when it was published in 1697 - said to have influenced the novels of Swift and Defoe. A man full of contradictions: he who achieved so much blew it later in life, declining into scandal, failure and even farce. A unique man ahead of his time, he lived a large part of his life among pirates yet managed to preserve what Coleridge called his "exquisite refinement of mind". A classic example of the best narrative history.

In 1631, the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, ordered the construction of a monument of unsurpassed splendour and majesty in memory of his beloved wife. Theirs was an extraordinary story of passionate love: although almost constantly pregnant - she bore him fourteen children - Mumtaz Mahal followed her husband on every military campaign.But then Mumtaz died in childbirth. Blinded by grief, Shah Jahan created an exquisite and extravagant memorial for her on the banks of the river Jumna. The Taj Mahal took twenty years to build and depleted the Moghul treasuries.But Shah Jahan was to pay a greater price for his obsession. He ended his days imprisoned by his own son in Agra Fort, gazing across the river at the monument to his love. The building of the Taj Mahal had set brother against brother and son against father in a savage conflict that pushed the seventeenth centurys most powerful empire into irreversible decline.

On May 7th, 1915 a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic sank with the loss of 1200 lives. On board were some world-famous figures, including multimillionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. But this wasnt the Titanic and there was no iceberg. The liner was the Lusitania and it was torpedoed by a German U-boat.Wilful Murder is the hugely compelling story of the sinking of the Lusitania. The first book to look at the events in their full historical context, it is also the first to place the human dimension at its heart. Using first-hand accounts of the tragedy Diana Preston brings the characters to life, recreating the splendour of the liner as it set sail and the horror of its final moments. Using British, American and German research material she answers many of the unanswered and controversial questions surrounding the Lusitania: why didnt Cunard listen to warnings that the ship would be a target of the Germans? Was the Lusitania sacrificed to bring the Americans into the War? What was really in the Lusitanias hold? Was she armed? Had Cunards offices been infiltrated by German agents? And did the Kaisers decision to cease unrestricted U-boat warfare in response to international outrage expressed after the sinking effectively change the outcome of the First World War?Highly readable, highly researched Wilful Murder casts dramatic new light on one of the worlds most famous maritime disasters.

La vertiginosa carrera por el desarrollo de las armas de destrucción masiva.«Un relato trepidante y electrizante.» Booklist «Preston explica hábilmente los momentos clave de la era preatómica y tej

La vertiginosa carrera por el desarrollo de las armas de destrucción masiva.«Un relato trepidante y electrizante.» Booklist «Preston explica hábilmente los momentos clave de la era preatómica y teje

Si el conocimiento es siempre poder, en el ámbito de la física aún lo es más. Produce vértigo el abismo que separa la apasionante aventura del saber que emprendieron pioneros como Marie Curie, movidos por el deseo de desentrañar los secretos del mundo material para mejorarlo, y el uso que se acabo dando a sus descubrimientos, un uso que podia destruir al mundo mismo.Diana Preston entreteje biografia, historia, fisica y politica para recorrer el camino que lleva en tan solo cincuenta años, de finales del siglo xix a mediados del xx, de un extremo a otro: de la curiosidad compulsiva y el deseo de saber, a la instrumentalizacion del conocimiento como arma de destruccion. Y lo hace poniendo en primer plano a los grandes protagonistas de la historia de la bomba atomica: cientificos como los Curie, Bohr, Einstein u Oppenheimer; politicos como Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Hirohito o Hitler; pero sin olvidar a las victimas y a personajes que no han pasado a la historia. Con una documentacion exhaustiva y una atencion especial al detalle humano la ambicion, el sufrimiento, el miedo, los problemas de conciencia, la autora describe los avances cientificos y tecnicos, las decisiones politicas y los dilemas morales de unos hombres que, por primera vez en la historia, tuvieron en sus manos el destino de la humanidad.