Mostrando resultados por autor "Damian O'Connor" en Todas las categorías

Children's stories. Expanded version of 'Cautionary Tales for Exceedingly Naughty Children'.

Joely Harpic is a dickhead. Over his long career as the longest serving Lieutenant in the British Army and, when the Army could bear no more, Consultant to Large Corporations, he has developed an invincible faith in his own special world view and a fondness for breakfast. He is quite content, especially as he is now being kept by the Bosnian ex-Countess he claims to have ‘rescued’ in a card game. All is well with Harpic’s world. Such contentment is now under dire threat as his leisured, rural world is about to get fracked and feminised. Will Harpic rise to the challenge? He will ...

Knitting together the empire was a class of men, a body of opinion, a ‘defence community’ of military, naval and colonial officials drawn together by a common belief that the empire was in such a poor state of defence as to present a standing temptation to an enemy. They also limited confidence in the ability of a post-1867 democracy to conduct an effective defence, foreign or imperial policy. The roots of these beliefs lay in their common experience in the empire, in war and in the several defence investigations and war scares that occurred between the Crimean War and the Balkan Crisis...

Welcome to the world of Oscar Wilde, H.G.Welles, P.C.Wren, John Buchan, Saki, Pooter and…Heath Robinson. This is Late Victorian Britain as it might have been, should have been, could have been and was have been (sic). A world where Queen Victoria came out of mourning and married the Maharajah and the laws of physics were gently adjusted so that clockwork, steam and the electric fluid could be pushed to the limits of technology. Here pith helmets and stammering Brigadiers battle with Cossack enemies out to ruin the empire and rule the world, crusty colonels and poetic dreamers cross swords...

The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 is one of the most famous colonial conflicts of the imperial era and its origins are a source of great debate. This is the first biography of the man who started that war in more than a century and offers a new insight into both the man and the causes of the war.

Disgraced and demoted Commandant Farbell Gifford, terror of the middle Yangtse, is sent back home to take over the run down Bristol branch of the Excise and Detection Service. A murder on his first day quickly reveals the limitations of his subordinates and faces him with the triple challenge of finding the culprit, reforming the department and, more urgently, buying a new boat. Set in a sort of 19th Century Bristol and Bath, the gothic world that Commandant Gifford inhabits is characterised by sentient clockwork, urchins, Girls’ Schools, bad weather, bombs, airships, Abolitionists, ...

When Dizzy Walker went to war in 1939, he imagined it would be a matter of trenches, mud, blood, gore and bad weather. Instead he found himself serving King and Empire by manning a gun on a remote Indian Ocean atoll, a paradise complete with palm trees, a perfect lagoon, endless blue skies and very little chance of ever seeing the enemy. He also expected that his war would be spent in the company of like-minded men, flint-eyed and eager for battle. Instead, he found himself among a collection of characters eccentric for even a small colonial society - 'a lot of Crusties, Grunters and ...

Pete Adderley, a retired academic is confronted by a failed career and the prospect of a failing future when he is asked to investigate the disappearance of an old university friend,Andrew Lincoln. The search brings him into contact with two other old acquaintances, one an intelligence agent, the other an Aid worker in Africa, both of whom will draw him into a modern Heart of Darkness in West Africa.

There is trouble in the Kuruman Lolwapa where Ragwasi is being plagued by three ladies of old acquaintance and Boitumela, haughty as ever, has got a problem of her own. In order to escape these troubles, Pelly and Ragwasi embark on a road trip across the landscape and history of South Africa. Trouble is not so easily avoided though and when it comes crashing back, Pelly and Ragwasi embark on the biggest hunt of their lives. To free Ragwasi from an ancient curse, a Titan must fall.

Disgraced son of a gentleman farmer, Nicholas Pelly is sent to redeem himself in the turbulent South African colonies. Taken under the wing of Ragwasi, his African friend and mentor, Pelly crosses the cultural divides of the late 19th Century to take up arms against the enemies of the Tswana people, marry an African woman and travel through the wars and landscapes of the period in search of redemption. After a decade of upheaval, service in the British and Tswana armies and attempts to make restitution he returns home to England in the hope of a prodigal son’s welcome.

The adventures of the Hobgoblin King and his sidekick, Winkeldump.

It's 1940, the Phoney War, and things are going pretty well for Stollie Prendergast. He's got an Alvis Firefly, a commission in the County Yeomanry and a French Countess who appreciates the efforts he's making to defend her country and shows it in a variety of very pleasant ways. And then from out of the blue arrives Helena Bloody Martingdale.... And hot on her heels comes the whole of the Nazi war machine.... Suddenly, Stollie's pampered existence comes to an end and stretching out in front of him is a very long road through the chaos of war. It's a road like no other and it will take him ...

This is a novel set in 1980 when the South African Defence Forces were engaged in a secret bush war in Angola and Namibia. Joshua Smith, an over-promoted police sergeant with an anti-Apartheid activist for a mother, is sent to investigate the battlefield murder of a wealthy white officer. There are three suspects, all unlikely, no forensic evidence, no witnesses and, as he is fully aware, no rule of law. Sucked into an investigation which has its roots in the politics of Apartheid at a point in time when Nelson Mandela was just emerging from obscurity, Smith is joined by an officer from ...

The legend of Kruger's Millions has been exercising the minds of treasure hunters for more than a century. Finally, thanks to Nicholas Pelly, Ragwasi, the mysterious Major Willoughby and a man who may or may not be Pelly's wastrel nephew, the mystery is solved.

During a chaotic UN evacuation from a 2009 Congo genocide, Tim Johnson, ex-SAS, City whizz kid and aid worker is mysteriously kidnapped, presumed dead. Two years later, John Mackenzie, fading journalist and ex-Cambridge university acquaintance claims to have found Johnson, briefly, in a hospital in Botswana before losing him again. During a chance meeting in Shanghai, Mackenzie asks the narrator, an old Cambridge acquaintance and psychologist, for his professional opinion of the incredible tale that Johnson told him of an Inselberg, a desert Shangri-La. Before the narrator can report his ...