Bøker av Jim Ring

1946: Britain is occupied by the Nazis. Hitler is assassinated triggering a struggle for power among the Nazis, revolt across the Occupied Continent, and schism in Washington. A thriller and literary cryptogram that numbers Princess Elizabeth, Churchill, Edward and Wallis, Roosevelt, the Kennedys and sundry Forces Chiefs in its Tolstoyan cast.

From the Fall of France in June 1940 to Hitler's suicide in April 1945, the swastika flew from the peaks of the High Savoy in the western Alps to the passes above Ljubljana in the east. The Alps as much as Berlin were the heart of the Third Reich.'Yes,' Hitler declared of his headquarters in the Bavarian Alps, 'I have a close link to this mountain. Much was done there, came about and ended there; those were the best times of my life . . . My great plans were forged there.'With great authority and verve, Jim Ring tells the story of how the war was conceived and directed from the Fuhrer's mountain retreat, how all the Alps bar Switzerland fell to Fascism, and how Switzerland herself became the Nazi's banker and Europe's spy centre. How the Alps in France, Italy and Yugoslavia became cradles of resistance, how the range proved both a sanctuary and a death-trap for Europe's Jews - and how the whole war culminated in the Allies' descent on what was rumoured to be Hitler's Alpine Redoubt, a Bavarian mountain fortress.

Immortalized as the author of The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers led a life quite as enigmatic and adventurous as his classic novel.Childers was orphaned at an early age. Though he was brought up in County Wicklow, he received an English education that culminated in a clerkship to the House of Commons, voluntary service in the Boer War, and the writing of his great novel. Thus far he appeared patriotic, imperialist and largely conformist. But marriage to a strong-willed Bostonian and an increasing interest in the affairs of Ireland led to his questioning the imperial Zeitgeist. At first this took constitutional forms, but such was Childers' frustration with progress towards any manner of Irish independence from British rule, that on the eve of the First World War he instigated gun-running to supporters of the Home Rule movement.Nonetheless, he still regarded it as his duty to serve England, and during the war he distinguished himself as an observer in the early seaplanes and torpedo boats. Traumatized, however, by the Easter Rising of 1916, he finished the war profoundly divided in his loyalties. With the Irish question now critical, Childers settled his fate by becoming the official propagandist for the Republican movement. He opposed the treaty that established the Irish Free State, regarding the compromise as anathema, and joined the IRA. Hunted by the Free State authorities, he was eventually captured and executed in November 1922.Set against the backdrop of Britain's imperial zenith, the great naval arms race and the First World War, Jim Ring's acclaimed biography of Childers does full justice to this dramatic and intriguing story. 'Jim Ring has written a fine and fluent biography of an extraordinary man, navigating the angry waters [of Irish politics] with a sure hand but dodging none of the difficulties.' Independent on Sunday

We Come Unseen, first published in 2001, follows the careers of six Royal Navy submariners from their graduation from Dartmouth's Britannia Royal Naval College in 1963, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Between these dates, it seemed that nuclear war was never far away - and Jim Ring explains not only the nuclear threat and its beginnings in the last days of the Second World War, but why the Polaris and Trident submarines ('capable of inflicting the damage of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki many times over'), and their accompanying attack submarines, were critical to avoiding war. Alongside a gripping narrative of the Cold War game of hide-and-seek played out under the waves of the northern seas, Ring gives an account of the history of submarine warfare from its earliest, pre-nuclear days to the 1982 combat in the Falklands.'A welcome acknowledgement of one of the Cold War's little-known aspects.' Alan Judd, Sunday Telegraph'An extraordinary story . . . one of the most significant naval books of the year.' Ship's Telegraph'A remarkable story.' Navy News

For English read British which is not to quibble with the title but, as Jim Ring himself explains, 'During the period on which this book focuses, it was the custom - in the words of a Scot - ''to let the part - the larger part - speak for the whole.'' Those countries which received them - France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and above all Switzerland - all talked of the English, and the presence of the English in the Alps was precisely so described. To use the term British would thus have been an anachronism.'The nineteenth century will forever be associated with the growth of the British Empire, but nearer home there was a quieter conquest taking place. Gradually the English were taking over the Alps, scaling their peaks, driving railways through them, and introducing both winter sports and those quintessential English institutions - tea, baths, lawn tennis and churches - to remote mountain villages.Jim Ring tells the remarkable story of the English love affair with the Alps, from its beginnings with the Romantic movement, when poets such as Byron and Shelly wrote of the mountains with awed delight, through the great days of the 1850s and 1860s and the formation of the Alpine Club, to the inter-war years when the English assured the future prosperity of the alpine resorts by virtually inventing and then popularizing downhill-skiing.Part history, part biography, How the English made the Alps brings the characters - the artists, the scientists, the gentleman-adventurers, the invalids, the aristocrats, eccentrics and mountain-scramblers - vividly to life.'Jim Rings's book cannot be bettered.' Daily Mail'Fascinating' Stephen Venables, Daily Telegraph 'Evocative and entertaining' Financial Times'A comprehensive, well-written account of a fascinating subject' Guardian