In den Furchen des Lichts

The true story of Gerard Mercator, the greatest map-maker of all time, who was condemned to death as a heretic.‘Geographie and Chronologie I may call the Sunne and the Moone, the right eye and the left, of all history.’In ‘The World of Gerard Mercator’, Andrew Taylor chronicles both the story of a great astronomer and mathematician, who was condemned to death as a heretic, and the history of that most fascinating conjunction of science and art: the drawing of maps. Gerard Mercator was born in Flanders in 1512. In addition to creating accurate globes of the earth and the stars, he was the first person to use latitude and longitude for navigation and he created the most-used map of all time: Mercator’s Projection is still the standard view of the world, the one we all envisage when we think of a map of the globe. Simply finding the best solution to the impossible challenge of reproducing the spherical world on a flat sheet of paper was a considerable achievement in itself – something geographers and map-makers had been trying to do for centuries, but Mercator also created the map of the world that would form the basis of the modern age, an image of the continents for the common man.Until Mercator’s Projection, maps offered a pictorial encyclopaedia to an illiterate world, and that world stretched far beyond the knowledge and travels of most mapmakers. It is this evolution of mapmaking from art to science that forms the backdrop to the story of Mercator, from the days of Herodotus and Strabo when fabulous creatures were supposed to inhabit the fringes of the world to the great mappae mundi of Hereford and Ebsdorf. The Greek geographer Pytheas claimed to have visited the far north of Britain to establish the limits of the habitable world; but further north, he claimed that the earth, air and sea coalesced into a jellyfish-like gelatinous suspension that made life impossible.‘The World of Gerard Mercator’ is a brilliantly readable and absolutely fascinating history for the general reader, describing how our worldview came into being.

In the tradition of ‘Agent Zigzag’ comes a breathtaking biography of WWII’s ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ as fast-paced and emotionally intuitive as the best spy thrillers. This celebrates unsung hero Robert de La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat turned anti-Nazi saboteur, and his exploits as a British Special Operations Executive-trained resistantA scion of one of the oldest families in France, Robert de La Rochefoucauld was raised in a magnificent chateau and educated in Europe’s finest schools. When the Nazis invaded and imprisoned his father, La Rochefoucauld escaped to England and was trained in the dark arts of anarchy and combat – cracking safes, planting bombs and killing with his bare hands – by a collection of SOE spies. With his newfoundskills, La Rochefoucauld returned to France and organized Resistance cells, blew up fortified compounds and munitions factories, interfered with Germany’s wartime missions and executed Nazi officers. Caught by the Germans, La Rochefoucauld withstood months of torture and escaped his own death sentence, not once but twice.More than just a fast-paced, real-life thriller, The Saboteur is also a deep dive into an endlessly fascinating historical moment, revealing the previously untold story of a network of commandos, motivated by a shared hatred of the Nazis, who battled evil and bravely worked to change the course of history.

To wolf expert, Shaun Ellis, wolves aren’t just his work, they’re also his family. An extraordinary man, Shaun has been fascinated by wolves all his life, living as part of their pack for two years with no human contact. What he gained was a unique and fascinating insight into their world, and that of our very own domestic dogs.Shaun Ellis grew up in the Norfolk countryside with a passion for and understanding with animals from an early age. His early fascination with wolves, and determination to understand them, led to him spending years in the US with the Naz Paz Indian tribe, watching wolves, learning to understand their roles and behaviour in the pack and how to communicate with them. He even lived as part of a wild pack for two years, without any human contact. Bringing his knowledge back to the UK, he astonished wildlife experts with his knowledge and insight. He now lives, eats and sleeps with his two wolf packs at Combe Martin Wildlife Park. This is the story of Shaun’s determination to understand these extraordinary animals and how what he has learned can help others to understand their own domestic dogs.

From the playing fields of Eton via the horrors of the Western Front to the pinnacle of political power in 20th-century Britain – a brilliant collective biography of Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttleton and Harry Crookshank.Harold Macmillan, Oliver Lyttleton, Bobbety Cranbourne and Harry Crookshank all arrived at Eton in 1906, all served on the Western Front in the same battalion of the Grenadier Guards and all served in Cabinet under Winston Churchill during World War II. They helped Churchill regain Downing Street in 1951 and once more joined his Cabinet as senior figures. These four men who were lifelong friends (and sometimes enemies), argued and fought their way up the political ladder for over forty years.The theme of Simon Ball's brilliant book is a race, willingly entered into by these four men, for power and glory. ‘Politics is not a flat race, it's a steeplechase,’ as Churchill once told Macmillan. And through the collective biography, Ball presents an extraordinary portrait of political ambition and intrigue from World War II until Macmillan’s resignation as Prime Minister in 1963, tracing the lives of his four protagonists through the trauma of the trenches, the Treaty of Versailles and the rebuilding of Europe after the Great War.Ball has based the book on years of original research in many archives and has had exclusive access to the Salisbury papers, closed to the public until 2022. The Guardsmen is a work of significant scholarship that presents a gripping account of British politics in the 20th-century.

Matthew Dennison creates a revealing portrait of the brave and charismatic Vita, in the first biography of her to be written for thirty years.Vita Sackville-West was a woman who defied categorisation. She was the dispossessed girl whose lonely childhood at Knole inspired enduring feats of imagination, the celebrated author and poet, the adored and affectionate wife whose marriage included passionate homosexual affairs (most famously with Virginia Woolf ), and the recluse who found in nature and her garden at Sissinghurst Castle solace from the contradictions of her extraordinary life. In this dazzling new biography, Matthew Dennison traces these complexities, depicting a prolific, radical, sensitive and uncompromising figure in all her depth.