Nazis, Spies & Fakes: Ten Years at the Coalface of History

"Guy Walters is a stellar historical journalist...Each article is well researched and colourfully written." Rebecca Rideal, The History Vault

For over a decade, the historian Guy Walters has been writing about a huge variety of historical topics for many newspapers and magazines. Assembled here are over eighty articles, all written in Walters’s customary lively and accessible style. Designed to be dipped into on the train, in bed – or even in the bath – this collection includes a vast range of heroes and villains from history.

Featured here are Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, and Josef Mengele; spies such as Donald Maclean, Robert Bruce Lockhart, and Markus Wolf; and those Walters regards as fakes, who include Mary Seacole and the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

There are plenty of other sorts of historical figures here as well. There are Olympians such as Jesse Owens; British heroes in the form of Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Francis Drake; and even a few Shaolin monks, some daredevil balloonists, and a handful of brave monkeys.

Walters also examines famous events including the Great Escape, the Katyn murders, the killings by Anders Breivik, the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War, and the German Occupation of the Channel Islands during World War Two.

Ranging from Viking marauders in southern Britain to the death camps of today’s North Korea, Walters covers an extraordinary range of time and place. There is truly something for everyone in this entertaining and informative collection.