DOUGLAS BOTTING

Gavin Maxwell was a romantic, self-destructive, aristocratic adventurer who worked as secret agent, shark fisherman, racing driver, poet and travel writer. His books on Iraq, Sicily and Morocco were acclaimed, but his fame as a writer rested on his bestselling story of the otters he raised and lived with in a remote cottage on the west coast of Scotland, Ring of Bright Water. Maxwells private life was every bit as turbulent. His essential homosexuality was masked by the love of a number of women, for whom he was a serially unsatisfactory partner. This authorized biography is a magnificent evocation of the man, his time and the animals and places that formed such an important part of it. Never was the simple life of a nature-loving conservationist pursued by so complicated a character.

This edition does not include illustrations. The authorised biography of the great naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell, who died aged seventy in January 1995 in Jersey, where he founded the zoo hed dreamed of as a small boy and pioneered the captive breeding of animals for conservation. Gerald Durrell was a world-famous naturalist and popular author who wrote, in all, some thirty-seven immensely readable yarns, including the bestselling My Family and Other Animals. His other books include Birds, Beasts and Relatives, The Bafut Beagles and A Zoo in My Luggage. Above all, he paved the way in print for the popular presentation of the natural world on television and presented twelve series himself the early ones, of his own expeditions. Sir David Attenborough has said: He was responsible for changing peoples attitudes to zoology and changing their agenda. He showed them small animals could be as interesting as apes and elephantsHe was a pioneer with a marvellous sense of humour. His brother was the famous writer Lawrence Durrell.

A riveting thriller-style account of what happened to the Nazi gold hoardGuardianA major feat of detection . . . a remarkable story Birmingham PostIn 1945, as Allied bombers continued their final pounding of Berlin, the panicking Nazis began moving the assets of the Reichsbank south for safekeeping. Vast trainloads of gold and currency were evacuated from the doomed capital of Hitlers Thousand-year Reich.Nazi Gold is the real-life story of the theft of that fabulous treasure - worth some 2,500,000,000 at the time of the original investigation. It is also the story of a mystery and attempted whitewash in an American scandal that pre-dated Watergate by nearly 30 years. Investigators were impeded at every step as they struggled to uncover the truth and were left fearing for their lives.The authors quest led them to a murky, dangerous post-war world of racketeering, corruption and gang warfare. Their brilliant reporting, matching eyewitness testimony with declassified Top Secret documents from the US Archives, lays bare this monumental crime in a narrative which throngs with SS desperadoes, a red-headed queen of crime and American military governors living like Kings. Also revealed is the authors discovery of some of the missing treasure in the Bank of England.