Just thirteen months before the opening match of the 2014 World Cup, Brazil has been declared fi nancially bankrupt and has no alternative other than to withdraw from hosting the tournament. Faced with this unprecedented emergency, the thoroughly inept yet ruthlessly tyrannical President of the Global Confederation de Football, Horst Gasch, and his obtuse sidekick, Senior Vice President, Serge Le Planque, must fi nd another host nation and fast. Both are zealous Anglophobes and are desperate to maintain their strategy of staging the tournament anywhere in the world . . . except England. Meanwhile, due the death of the local MP in extremely sordid circumstances, Alan Boots Boothroyd, football fanatic and manager of Sunday league team, overcomes a personal crisis by deciding to run for Parliament. After becoming sensationally elected, Boots stumbles across the debaucherous nocturnal pursuits of the countrys senior politicians. Armed with information that could bring down the government, Boots ingeniously maneuvers himself into an extraordinary position within the dark, sinister corridors of Westminster. On the fi eld, the English football team is in total disarray. Coached by a hapless manager and deprived of key players by the Premier League managers policy of club before country, the national team has suffered defeat after defeat in the matches leading up to the World Cup. When the tournament fi nally begins, Horst Gasch and the hierarchy of the Global Confederation de Football deviously conspire to engineer a humiliating exit for England. In response, Boots decides to fi ght back and do whatever it takes for England in her quest for a Second Star above the Three Lions Crest.

Six gentlemen, one goal: the destruction of Hitler's war machine In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler's war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was every bit as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them, Cecil Clarke, was a maverick engineer who had spent the 1930s inventing futuristic caravans. Now, his talents were put to more devious use: he built the dirty bomb used to assassinate Hitler's favorite, Reinhard Heydrich. Another, William Fairbairn, was a portly pensioner with an unusual passion: he was the world's leading expert in silent killing, hired to train the guerrillas being parachuted behind enemy lines. Led by dapper Scotsman Colin Gubbins, these men—along with three others—formed a secret inner circle that, aided by a group of formidable ladies, single-handedly changed the course Second World War: a cohort hand-picked by Winston Churchill, whom he called his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Giles Milton's Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a gripping and vivid narrative of adventure and derring-do that is also, perhaps, the last great untold story of the Second World War.