After a remarkable and impressive career in the army Jack Spencer was given a dishonourable discharge, taking the blame for his colonel's blunder. He discovers that there is no place for him in civilian life and, in despair, he begins to look for jobs he considers beneath him. Finally he takes a job as chauffeur and odd job man to a young Brigadier Ashford, who he later discovers is an arms dealer. He makes the most of the job and is soon training troops in South America, as well as selling weapons for a revolution. Jack is convinced it is all quite legal and is sent to Africa, only to find himself mixed up in a violent and bloody uprising involving Ashford himself. Narrowly escaping a firing squad he returns to South America to sort out what was left after the rapid but successful revolution. He is appointed Head of Security for the new President but soon discovers that both the old exiled president and a mining tycoon have designs to seize the running of the country. Jack's task is to prevent them.

Most Western models suggest that in the face of open threats to the military's core interests, the army would have fought to keep the status quo. Yet the military actually facilitated the introduction of a new democratic polity and in the process dug its own grave. Trained under a Russian-inspired system that minimized the role of the individual, this group was suddenly exposed to the radically different 'Innere Fuehrung' concept that lies at the heart of the Bundeswehr's ethos.

Jurgen Herbst s account of growing up in Nazi Germany from 1928 to 1948 is a boy s experience of anti-Semitism and militarism from the inside. Herbst was a middle-class boy in a Lutheran family that saw value in Prussian military ideals and a mythic German past. His memoir is a compelling, understated tale of moral awakening.

The time is the tenth century. The place is glorious Crdoba, capital of Moorish Al Andaluz where plots involve a coalition to arrest the despotism of El Mansur who is systematically despoiling their tolerant and cultured society to gain power and wealth. The coalition - self-named the Seers - includes a Caliphs wife, a Muslim merchant, the palace Chief Cook, a Jewish physician-diplomat, the Mother Superior of a Christian convent, a Moorish General, a Court poet and young woman slave. Seers machinations include assassinations, sabotage, spying and - naturally - love. It could have happened, since some characters were historical.

Makine's most ambitious and uncompromising work, "Requiem for a Lost Empire" is a three-generation epic unfolding across 80 years of Russian history, from Czarist times to the fall of Communism. Sweeping readers into a Graham Greene-style thriller that opens up like a sinister Russian doll, this novel rivals the depth and ingenuity of Nabokov and the sweep of Tolstoy.

Between the French Indochina war of the fifties and the fall of Phnom Penn and Saigon in 1975, 134 photographers from different nations were killed. Horst Faas, two-times Pullitzer Prize winner and Chief Photographer for The Associated Press in Saigon at the height of the war, and Tim Page, another veteran who had been badly wounded, have gathered many thousands of photos from the Western agencies and from archives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. These have now been assembled to form both a monument to the dead and a record of the most terrifying war photography ever taken. Never again will the media have the kind of access to the war zone that was offered to the photographers in Vietnam. In many cases the photographers tried to get as close as possible, then paid the price.