The greatest conquest in historyGenghis Khan left an empire more than twice the size of Alexander's: his successors went on to conquer and govern an area stretching from Korea to the River Danube. How did a band of nomadic herdsmen achieve so much, so fast?Despite these stunning achievements, many writers dismiss the Mongols as just ferocious barbarians. This bestselling book sets the record straight. The epic starts in 1206 - when Genghis became master of 'all the people with felt tents' and an unknown tribe took the first steps towards world domination - and ends with the empire's decline and fall, after Khubilai Khan's triumphant unification with China.Robert Marshall describes their devastating invasions, including that of feudal Europe and Christendom's clumsy attempts to understand and fend off these legendary warriors. Full of extraordinary events, painted on a vast and colourful canvas, Storm from the East brings to life a time when East and West...

The story of one of the most astonishing episodes of espionage and deception of World War Two.This is the tale of two men: Claude Dansey, deputy head of MI6, and double agent Henri Dericourt, who was planted with the rival wartime secret service – SOE – at Dansey's instructions. From there began a terrifying trail of destruction.After making contact with Dansey in 1942, Dericourt was recruited to SOE as the man desperately needed to organize top-secret flights in and out of occupied French territory. But at the same time Dericourt was in touch with German counter-espionage in Paris. As SOE congratulated themselves on a new asset, Dericourt gave the Nazis everything; every flight, operation and coded message he could.Against a background of unprecedented deception and betrayal, Dansey's secret MI6 operation eventually led to the arrest of nearly one thousand men and women, hundreds of whom died in concentration camps.How did it go so...

An extraordinary true story of survival and courage through the Holocaust.Poland, 1943. It was the last refuge of the desperate, a warren of sewers underneath their city. Above, as the Nazis destroyed the ghetto of the city of Lvov, a small band of Jews escaped into a grim network of tunnels, living for fourteen months with the city's waste, the sudden floods, the fumes and the damp, the rats, the darkness, and the despair.Their only support was a lone sewer worker, an ex-criminal who constantly threatened to leave them. Many died; some falling into the rushing waters of the river, some simply of exhaustion. At one point the survivors found themselves trapped in a chamber, filling to the roof with storm-water.Yet survive they did, even infiltrating the camps above to find their missing relatives. When the Russians liberated Lvov, they emerged from the sewers filthy, bent double, emaciated, unrecognizable... but alive.This powerful story based on a long...