The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently fallen on hard times. The resulting fusion of American can-do and British fuck-you didn’t just lead to rock and roll’s most resonant music. It ushered in a golden era when a generation of kids born in ration card Britain, who had grown up with their nose pressed against the window of America’s plenty, were invited to wallow in their big neighbour’s largesse. It deals with a time when everything that was being done - from the Beatles playing Shea Stadium to the Rolling Stones at Altamont, from the Who performing their rock opera at the Metropolitan Opera House to David Bowie touching down in the USA for the first time with a couple of gowns in his luggage - was being done for the very first time. Rock and roll would never be quite so exciting again.

American soldiers overseas during World War II were famously said to be “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But the assaults, rapes, and other brutal acts didn’t only happen elsewhere, far away from a home front depicted as safe and unscathed by the “good war.” To the contrary, millions of American and Allied troops regularly poured into ports like New York and Los Angeles while on leave. Euphemistically called “friendly invasions,” these crowds of men then forced civilians to contend with the same kinds of crime and sexual assault unfolding in places like Britain, France, and Australia. With unsettling clarity, Aaron Hiltner reveals what American troops really did on the home front. While GIs are imagined to have spent much of the war in Europe or the Pacific, before the run-up to D-Day in the spring of 1944 as many as 75% of soldiers were stationed in US port cities, including more than three million who moved through New York City. In these cities, largely uncontrolled soldiers sought and found alcohol and sex, and the civilians living there—women in particular—were not safe from the violence fomented by these de facto occupying armies. Troops brought their pocketbooks and demand for “dangerous fun” to both red-light districts and city centers, creating a new geography of vice that challenged local police, politicians, and civilians. Military authorities, focused above all else on the war effort, invoked written and unwritten legal codes to grant troops near immunity to civil policing and prosecution. The dangerous reality of life on the home front was well known at the time—even if it has subsequently been buried beneath nostalgia for the “greatest generation.” Drawing on previously unseen military archival records, Hiltner recovers a mostly forgotten chapter of World War II history, demonstrating that the war’s ill effects were felt all over—including by those supposedly safe back home.

Reynolds' readable and scholarly yet entertaining book explores the rich variety of relations between pushy, homesick American Gis, famously lampooned as 'over-paid, over-sexed, over-fed and over here' and their British hosts - 'under-sexed, under-paid, under-fed and under Eisenhower' - during the Second World War.This clever blend of military and social history is the result of relentless research of massive archival and oral sources. David Reynolds balances his study of government and military policies with a vivid, impressionistic account of the formal and informal relationships between the occupiers and the occupied.'an important and original contribution to our understanding of the Second World War' John Keegan, Daily Telegraph

Wages for the majority have been stagnant for decades, but a lucky few have enjoyed a pay bonanza. Top company bosses take home in several days as much as most people earn in a whole year. In this hard-hitting book, Deborah Hargreaves explains why pay for the top 0.1% has sky-rocketed in the past 20 years. She gives a devastating account of how it has created a vicious circle that destabilizes our economy and undermines social cohesion, demolishing the twisted logic of the chief executives who say: ‘I’m worth it’, when that means raking in £70m a year. A rigorous exposé of the dysfunctional nature of our ‘winner-takes-all’ economy, this book debunks the myths behind top pay and examines a range of pragmatic solutions.