The Lost Oasis tells the true story behind The English Patient. An extraordinary episode in World War II, it describes the Zerzura Club, a group of desert explorers and adventurers who indulged in desert travel by early-model-motor cars and airplanes, and who searched for lost desert oases and ancient cities of vanished civilizations. In reality, they were mapping the desert for military reasons and espionage. The club's members came from countries that soon would be enemies: England and the Allied Forces v. Italy and Germany. When war erupted in 1939, Ralph Bagnold founded the British Long Range Desert Group to spy on and disrupt Rommel's advance on Cairo, while a fellow club member, Hungarian Count Almasy, succeeded in placing German spies there. Ultimately, the British prevailed. Saul Kelly's riveting history draws on interviews with survivors and previously unknown documentary material in England, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Egypt. His book reads like a thriller -- with one key difference: it's all true.

From Venice to Vietnam, from the Welsh coast to Cairo, Don Meredith has traveled in the wake of twentieth-century writers, using their novels and poems as guides, as another wayfarer might turn to Fodor's or the Guide Bleu. He has gone in search of the back streets, basilicas, cafes, piazzas, and countrysides that figured so powerfully in the works of authors who are especially attuned to a sense of place. Part travelogue, part literary study, Varieties of Darkness is Meredith's account of his exploration of Michael Ondaatje's fascinating literary masterpiece The English Patient. Meredith mines the places, the real-life counterparts of the characters, and the curious creative mind of Ondaatje. Varieties of Darkness offers fresh insights into the novel and Ondaatje's prodigious use of scholarly detail.

This gripping book tells the remarkable story of Germany's special forces _ military, naval and aerial _ during the Second World War. Although capable of stunning achievements against all the odds, the absence of proper coordination and planning resulted in a lost opportunity for Germany. Units were raised ad hoc, as an increasingly desperate response to Germany's ever-weakening position and the growing strength of the Allies. ??At sea, flotillas of manned torpedoes and explosive motor boats were introduced. In the air, the world's first operational jet planes were grouped into special squadrons in an effort to cripple the US air offensive. On the ground, battalions of over-age men set out on foot or on bicycles towards Berlin to protect the city from the Soviet Army's tank armadas. In other parts of Germany the Werewolf was recruiting and training young people to carry out partisan warfare. Then there were the children of the Hitler Youth, some not even in their 'teens, who committed acts of sabotage against military installations and attacked British and Americans soldiers.??Packed with useful detail and incisive analysis, this is one of the fullest and most accessible accounts of Germany's special forces and their efforts to stave off impending military defeat.

East Timor / Taiwan

Humanitarian Invasion provides a history of international development and humanitarianism in Cold War Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a long way from both Canada and Australia, but from 2001, fate conspired to bring the three countries together. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Australia and Canada joined the U.S. and other Western allies in attacking al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 4, 2001, but this was only the beginning of a much longer engagement in Afghanistan for both Canada and Australia, with a legacy much more ambiguous than the initial campaign had promised. Australia and Canada in Afghanistan: Perspectives on a Mission offers twelve essays from distinguished experts and decision-makers involved in the war. Wide-ranging in scope, their work offers fresh analyses of the Afghan War and on Australia’s and Canada’s contributions to it.

In 1942, John Eppler was one of two German spies inserted behind British lines in Egypt after an epic crossing of the Western Desert organised by the Hungarian explorer Count László Almásy, Operation ‘Condor’. But this was far from his first adventure. Of German origin but raised since childhood in a wealthy Egyptian family and a convert to Islam, he had travelled widely in the Middle East for German Military Intelligence. The book details German links with Arab nationalists during the War: indeed, one of Eppler’s contacts in Cairo was a young officer called Anwar el-Sadat, later President of Egypt. Before Operation ‘Condor’. Eppler had been the interpreter when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem met Hitler in Berlin, and the book gives a full description of this controversial encounter. This story has inspired numerous films, such as Foxhole in Cairo (1960), where John Eppler was played by Adrian Hoven, and more recently Operation ‘Condor’ was referenced in the Oscar-winning The English Patient (1996). This is the genuine, first-hand account of one of the most daring missions of the Second World War.