Cimke: Great Britain

Codebreakers

The book reveals the story of British Codebreakers from the reign of Elizabeth I to the Cold War. It explores the use of ciphers during the Napoleonic wars, the role of the Royal Mail’s Secret Office and the activities the Admiralty’s ‘Room 40’leading to the creation of the Government’s Code and Cypher School. The main theme of the book are the events of the Second World War and the battle to break the German enigma codes.

Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister : The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen

In 1807, genteel, Bermuda-born Fanny Palmer (1789-1814) married Jane Austen’s youngest brother, Captain Charles Austen, and was thrust into a demanding life within the world of the British navy. Experiencing adventure and adversity in wartime conditions both at sea and onshore, the spirited and resilient Fanny travelled between and lived in Bermuda, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and England. After crossing the Atlantic in 1811, she ingeniously made a home for Charles and their daughters aboard a working naval vessel, and developed a supportive friendship with his sister, Jane.

Bittersweet Brexit: The Future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour

Although widely criticised and hugely wasteful, The Common Agricultural Policy did at least afford British farmers a degree of support. Post-Brexit, that support will vanish – to be replaced with a woefully misconceived agricultural export drive that cannot possibly deliver. Bittersweet Brexit suggests a solution: paying workers decent wages in the agricultural sector could radically transform the nature of farming in Britain. It would improve yields, increase sustainability and ensure greater self-sufficiency at a time when food security is becoming a vital issue. This scenario provides a progressive, forward-thinking and optimistic future for food and farming in Britain, which, unlike many other industries, is currently being ignored.

Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The Expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England’s Forgotten Arctic Explorer

Benjamin Leigh Smith discovered and named dozens of islands in the Arctic but published no account of his pioneering explorations. He refused public accolades and sent stand-ins to deliver the results of his work to scientific societies. Yet, the Royal Geographic Society’s Sir Clements R. Markham referred to him as a polar explorer of the first rank.Traveling to the Arctic islands that Leigh Smith explored and crisscrossing England to uncover unpublished journals, diaries, and photographs, archaeologist and writer P. J. Capelotti details Leigh Smith’s five major Arctic expeditions and places them within the context of the great polar explorations in the nineteenth century.